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RSS subscription surprises in Feedburner stats

July 3, 2006 by Neville HobsonĀ 

FB statsIf you use Feedburner for distribution of your RSS feed, it’s worth paying attention to the useful statistics about your feed such as how many people subscribe to it and which RSS reader they use.

Even if you only use FB’s free standard stats rather than the paid-for TotalStats Pro service, you’ll find some extremely useful information.

I just updated the list of subscription options to this blog and while at Feedburner, I reviewed my feed stats for the first time in a month.

The chart you see here shows the average number of subscribers over the past seven days and which RSS reader they use.

Some surprises there.

For instance, it does surprise me that nearly half (47%) of subscribers use Bloglines. The surprise is that this stat has been pretty constant ever since I first started using Feedburner in 2004. The market for web-based RSS reader services has grown dramatically over the past two years, with many other online reader options to choose from. Yet Bloglines still remains the favourite.

Number two in web-based subscription is NewsGator. The chart has clipped the numbers, which are 74 (14%). That’s a small increase since a month ago, which was also an increase.

Next surprise – the rapidly-increasing number of people who have susbcribed via the Live Bookmarks feature in Firefox since I last checked these stats at the end of May: 36 subscribers or 6% of the total.

A month ago, it was half that. Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise, in fact. Maybe it indicates that more Firefox users are finding it simple to just add an RSS feed in their browser. This simplicity will spread out even more when Internet Explorer 7 is released in the autumn (or later) as IE7 also includes similar functionality.

Incidentally, subscribing to RSS feeds in Firefox is now even easier if you use a tool like the latest version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox which has a nifty “Subscribe to feed” button which highlights itself whenever it finds a feed on a website. You can configure it to add the subscription to your RSS reader of choice. Once you’ve done that, subscribing is a one-click process.

Also of interest is Rojo. Hardly any subscribers a month ago. Now, 14% of subscribers use this web-based services.

So three-quarters (75%) of subscribers to my RSS feed subscribe through three major online RSS services. How does that measure in your experience?

What about desktop readers, ie, applications you install on your own computer? The surprise here for me is NetNewsWire, a reader for the Mac (and purchased by NewsGator last year) with 24 subscribers (14%) using it. That’s not the surprise, though, it’s more that I expected FeedDemon (Windows app) to be the top one here – it’s my preferred method of managing my RSS subscription – but that has just 11 subscribers, one of which must be me.

Something else interesting – NewsGator products (that’s the NewsGator online service, NetNewsWire and FeedDemon) are used by about 25% of subscribers. Cornering a market, perhaps.

The FB stats can also give you a visual look at your overall RSS subscriptions as a timeline. This is the timeline for this blog which I started in February:

FB RSS subscriber timeline

Peaks and troughs but, overall, consistent growth in subscribers during the period. Nice to see that.

Finally, the stats suggest how varied and fragmented the RSS reader market really is. You have the prominent readers such as the ones I’ve mentioned. Yet the stats also show 134 subscribers (23%) using “other readers,” most of which I’ve never heard of.

Attensa for Outlook, for instance. And Windows Media Center 2005 Feed Reader. Or Hatena, NewsAlloy, Snoopy, Ilium Software NewsBreak and Topicca Alpha. None of those names appeared in the stats a month ago.

Could be a picture of an emerging long tail.

You learn some interesting and surprising things when you pay attention to your FeedBurner stats.

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Filed Under: NevilleHobson.com, RSS, Web, Weblog Tools, Weblogs

About Neville Hobson

Communication Leader, Social Media Leader, Consultant, Digital Change Agent, Speaker with a curiosity for tech and how people use it. Social Media Strategist at the Internet Society. Early adopter (and leaver) and experimenter with social media. Occasional test pilot of shiny new objects. Avid tea drinker. Follow @jangles on Twitter

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Phil Wolff says

    July 5, 2006 at 03:39

    The peaks and valleys are weekends. Presumably newsreaders at the office are turned off Friday evening. Not true for online services, of course.

  2. Nick Bradbury says

    July 5, 2006 at 14:34

    Neville, a big reason for the shrinking % of FeedDemon subscribers is due to FeedDemon’s synchronization with NewsGator Online. When feeds are synchronized in FeedDemon, NewsGator takes care of requesting the feeds. So, requests for synchronized feeds are counted as coming from NewsGator rather than from FeedDemon. This will affect NetNewsWire’s share as well, since it also syncs with NewsGator Online.

Trackbacks

  1. LexBlog Blog says:
    July 3, 2006 at 19:32

    RSS subscription info in FeedBurner stats…

    Neville Hobson’s got a nice post about the RSS subscription info in FeedBurner stats. The info includes how many people subscribe to your RSS feeds and which RSS reader they use. Also some nice graphs and charts laying things out…….

  2. Blogalistic » Popularity of the various RSS readers says:
    July 3, 2006 at 21:54

    […] Neville Hobson posted with some analysis of the feedreaders people subscribe to his feed with, and was surprised at how big a proportion a) used the NewsGator products and b) used other less well-known readers. […]

  3. Alex Barnett blog says:
    July 3, 2006 at 23:00

    More Feedburner statcrunching…

    As you might know, I like to keep an eye on my Feedburner / RSS / Aotm / feeds stats.
    Neville……

  4. Feedburner stats explained | MichelvanHelden.com says:
    July 4, 2006 at 13:05

    […] Nevil Hobson explains what the benefits are from feedburner. Bookmarking:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]

  5. Zoli's Blog says:
    July 4, 2006 at 18:30

    Bloglines Losing Market Share…

    (Updated)Bloglines is still the market leader amongst web-based feed-readers, but it’s clearly losing market share. Half a year ago almost all my Feedburner subscribers used Bloglines – now it’s back to 28%.

    (The chart was produced using Zoho Shee…

  6. FeedBurner acquires blog analytics company at NevilleHobson.com says:
    July 17, 2006 at 10:19

    […] RSS subscription surprises in Feedburner stats […]

  7. RSS subscriber milestone at NevilleHobson.com says:
    February 9, 2007 at 06:11

    […] RSS subscription surprises in Feedburner stats […]

  8. RSS: The increasing influence of Google Reader at NevilleHobson.com says:
    February 23, 2007 at 11:30

    […] Compare this picture to the stats I reported in July 2006 which you can see in the second image here. […]

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