Free news feed - RSS usage survey
Saturday, February 24th, 2007Microsoft have released a survey of 1354 users on their RSS consumption habits. Although not a massive number of subjects we can still glean some interesting results.
The results are based on Chinese users so the results will be biased towards asian users. We can see this reflected in the top 3 RSS readers as Zhuaxia is the second most popular reader, Bloglines being the most popular and the more recent Google reader coming in third.
Lots of feeds
It seems that people like to read lots of feeds with a third of users with over 100 feeds and over a third of users checking their RSS reader 5 or more times a day. I would presume most of the respondents of the survey have a tech related background and are using RSS to keep up to date and for research purposes.
A significant proportion of users appear to check their feeds at the start of the day, lunchtime and in the evening for about half an hour at a time. These users also have there own blogs and share information they find via their blog and also via social bookmarking sites.
RSS for sharing
It looks like publishing RSS feeds are a good idea if you have a techie audience as they tend to share their RSS discoveries with others. This is probably not that surprising as RSS is a great tool for disseminating information and also harvesting information for your own research.
Only having recently reported on the reporting of Google readers stats it seems that both Pheedo and Feedburner are only too happy to quench our thirst for RSS statistics.
Both parties have produced some pretty graphs to show us how RSS feeds amongst the general population are being consumed. On surprising statistic is that MyYahoo is showing a large market share, although MyYahoo tends to only display headlines rather than being an RSS reader.
I click you
After taking a look at the Feedburner figures I decided to compare this to our own RSS readership, that’s you. It seems that MyYahoo readers will click through to the website to read a post, this is mainly because they usually only see the headlines rather than the entire post.
You may remember that I carried out a little experiment on publishing full feeds at the end of last year. The results that I was expecting was that there would be an increase in subscribers. There was a small increase but nothing significant.
Is it something I said
Now for the shocking news. As a direct result of publishing full feeds there was a significant drop in clicks back to the website. Now you may be thinking that it is pretty obvious that this would happen. Why visit the site when you can read the content in your feed reader.
As a result I think we can conclude that if you want your RSS subscribers to visit your site do not publish full feeds. If you do publish full feeds then you really need to attract your readers back to your site by providing some additional content and also linking to old content in your new posts.
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It has been a while since we covered what RSS is really about. Inspired by a recent article by Sharon Housley of FeedForAll titled RSS does not equal blogs, we look at what RSS is really all about.
What is RSS for?
Believe me when I say people who are not into computers do not know what RSS is, more importantly they do not care. Most people are only aware of what the technology can do for them, in this case deliver news and information to their desktops.
RSS is a format for packaging up information in a standard way that software can read and present to the user.
How to use RSS
RSS feeds can be used by publishers to deliver content to end users when the end user asks for it. It is the opposite to email where the end user get the email whether they have asked for it or not.
Consumers of RSS use this technology to get information and have it presented to them in an organized way. The user can have all of their news information in one application. It makes it easier for people to keep up to date on what is happening around the web.
RSS, RSS and RSS
I have been told on more than one occasion that I write RSS too many times, every time I write about RSS. This is not intentional but it is hard to write about news feeds without writing RSS.
RSS is not the same as email and it is not a replacement for email. I have said this many times. RSS is not exclusively for bloggers although RSS is more common in blogging circles because blogging software publishes RSS feeds by default.
You can expect a jump in your FeedBurner subscriber counts in the next few days. Google has started reporting subscription numbers for its GoogleReader web-based RSS reader.
FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market
Rick Klau of FeedBurner blogged us some amazing stats that reflect the new tracking of Google RSS users. Some highlights follow…
- Subscription data for Google Reader and Google Homepage increased the number of feed subscriptions FeedBurner [cut] by 53%
- Yahoo! accounts for 54% of clicks; Google 21%, Bloglines 11%
- Google accounts for 59% of views; Bloglines 33%
- Google poll 76% of feeds; Bloglines 63%; Yahoo! 51%
http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2007/02/feedburners_view_of_the_feed_m.php
State of Blogosphere Search, Part V
Things have changed drastically since the last time I wrote about blogosphere search. For the better? Not really. For the worse? A bit. The biggest change is that Technorati and Google Blog Search now enjoy pretty much co-dominance in this domain. Other players like PubSub have disappeared with Bob Wyman denying problems all the way to his company’s grave. I’d point you to a blog entry, but even Bob’s blog has disappeared. Bloglines search has dissolved since purchased by Ask.com. Feedster lost both of their founders and all their users. BlogPulse, Blogdigger, Sphere and IceRocket have all had similar problems and are rarely heard from these days. Yahoo! blog search never really got out of the garage and has been replaced by Technorati provided results (I smell another Yahoo! acquisition). That’s a lot of bad news.
But worse, I don’t really like the results being returned by anybody these days. I’ll stick with the top three; Google, Technorati and Bloglines. These are the only three that received minimal good results in my recent survey of blogosphere search engines. The most common searches I perform are vanity searches for my domain (www.kbcafe.com) and my name (randy morin). Let’s examine the results returned by each.
A vanity search for my domain on Google blog search returns quite a bit of easily identified splogs. In fact, a blog called Flaccid Penis seems to be permanently in my results. This guy is a big gay porn splogger who happens to use the kbcafe.com tagspace. Unfortunately, Google indexes these links even though they are clearly marked as tags. Not that anybody else does any better. Further, any internal links in my blogs are reported in their results. I hate that.
A vanity search for my name on Google blog search is actually pretty good stuff, both the name and link search in Google blog search miss a lot of post and that forces me to rely on a secondary blogosphere search engine; Technorati and Bloglines. On the good side, both searches are fast and respond in sub-second all-the-time.
Technorati
Technorati continues to fall behind Google and I use them today only to supplement the Google results, which aren’t anywhere near perfect. Technorati is very slow with searches taking several seconds and as many as several dozens of seconds. Let’s examine the search for my domain on Technorati. Technorati, like Google, continues to index tags and since I use my own tagspace, my blog entries are reflected in this search. But worse, Technorati doesn’t really index RSS or blogs, but rather web pages. Some blogs that have me in their blogroll fall into these search results with every one of their blog posts. Add these problems to splog results and you end up with more bogus results than anything else.
Moving onto my name vanity search on Technorati and … waiting …. waiting … this is simply too slow. Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again. Yawn. Technorati seems to be down again. There we go. Finally! It seems my biggest promoter is none other than uber-splogger Elliot Back. This guy has been the #1 splogger for months now and his domains are still getting indexed by Technorati. Do they even have a splog team?
Blogslines
Bloglines, like Technorati is slow and often down for the count. Why am I even bothering. 100% of the kbcafe domain search results in Bloglines are reflections of my own blogging. Either blog entries on my blogs or legitimate automated syndication or bookmarks. Onto the name search results in Bloglines. This is so slow I’m about to give up. Hello? Anybody at Ask working on this? Once the Bloglines SERPs return, they aren’t that bad.
Conclusion
I’m using Google blog search as my primary blogosphere search engine. Mostly because it returns results immediately and is integrating directly into my favorite web search engine. One click and I switch between blogosphere and Web SERPs. Technorati and Bloglines are the only two other engines that can claim to be working. They are extremely slow and don’t provide better results. They do supplement my Google results, but that’s not saying much. It looks like Google wins, but this time it’s not because they are great, it’s because everybody else sucks.
Related entries…
- State of Blogosphere Search
- State of Blogosphere Search, Part II
- State of Blogosphere Search, Part III
- State of Blogosphere Search, Part IV
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