Kevin Donahue posts some RSS Aggregator stats for his FanBlogs network of sites – and I was taken aback to see who is number 1, by a long shot. No it’s not Bloglines, as it is for most of the geek set. For football fans, a staggering 64.8% of FanBlogs.com readers are subscribed using MyYahoo. Kevin writes:
“Since Fanblogs has over 100 college football feeds, I took the top conference feeds, combined, and got the averages below. This may not be the best method, but I think it’s a fair representation.”
My Yahoo 64.8%
FeedDemon 16.2%
Bloglines 14.8%
SharpReader 3.1%
Firefox Live Bookmarks 0.8%
and the rest
Kevin goes on to say that “Fanblogs users are (IMHO) Joe American. The audience is tilted towards the non-geek. My Yahoo is winning with that set.”
NB: I’m not sure how many subscribers FanBlogs has, but judging by a sample subscription I did of the main feed in Bloglines (49 Bloglines subscribers to that particular feed) it’s probably not a small number.
Now Kevin doesn’t sound all that surprised, but frankly I’m amazed at how much MyYahoo is ahead by. Here in the geek part of the blogosphere, we all assume that Bloglines rules and is the dominant RSS Aggregator. My stats back in December proved that and Feedburner’s own stats (with a very large data set) confirmed it – Bloglines has over 50% of the RSS Aggregator market.
Well not for US football fans, it seems. For them, MyYahoo is like the New England Patriots of RSS Aggregators and Bloglines is more like the Buffalo Bills (no offence to Bills fans). Mind you, it helps that MyYahoo buttons are plastered all over the Fanblogs syndication page đ
