Great news! Prompted by my December post about RSS
Reader Market Share, Feedburner (the
company I selected as the
most promising Web 2.0 company of 2004/5) has just released their
own RSS Aggregator stats. This is exactly what I asked for, because
statistically the Feedburner data is much much bigger – and hence more
statistically significant – than my own data. Also I assume Feedburner’s data
includes Boing Boing’s. Feedburner are
using their “most highly subscribed 800 feeds” and not only is Boing
Boing almost certainly Feedburner’s biggest client, it’s also arguably the
world’s most popular blog.
I’ll be chewing over this data over the next few days and I’ll post my
detailed analysis later. One quick observation for now: Feedburner’s top 3 is
the same as my top 3. Bloglines, followed by NetNewsWire, followed by
Firefox Live Bookmarks. However the gap that Bloglines has is nowhere near as
large as it was in my stats and NetNewsWire is a very healthy second (still only
just over half of Blogline’s share however!). This augers well for competition
in the RSS Aggregator space, because it’s always a worry when one company
monopolises the competition. And because NetNewsWire is not a browser-based RSS reader, does this also auger well for desktop clients (i.e.
non-Web 2.0), I wonder? And the Apple Mac for that matter… Or is it a reflection of the popularity of Apple Macs and desktop apps among techies, who are still the predominate users of RSS at this stage of the game?
So here are the official Feedburner stats (thanks Dick and the good folk of
Feedburner for posting this!):
Top 20 RSS clients across FeedBurner most highly subscribed 800 feeds as of January 6, 2005
Aggregator Name (Market Share Percentage)
1. Bloglines (32.86%)
2. NetNewsWire (16.95%)
3. Firefox Live Bookmarks (7.78%)
4. Pluck (7.20%)
5. NewsGator Online(4.45%)
6. (not identified) (4.07%)*
7. FeedDemon (3.83%)
8. SharpReader (3.27%)
9. My Yahoo (2.58%)
10. iPodder (2.42%)
11. NewsGator (2.23%)
12. Thunderbird (2.13%)
13. RSS Bandit (1.12%)
14. NewsFire (1.05%)
15. iPodderX (1.02%)
16. Sage (0.71%)
17. FeedReader (0.67%)
18. RssReader (0.54%)
19. LiveJournal (0.46%)
20. Opera RSS Reader (0.45%)
