Ensight - Jeremy Wright’s Personal Blog

Google: World’s #1 Feed Reader

by Jeremy Wright on February 17th, 2007

Like many other folk, I caught the news that Google has begun reporting subscriber numbers. Like most folk, I probably dismissed the news as vaguely interesting and something to look into later.

This morning, when I checked b5’s FeedBurner subscriber numbers and saw that we’d broken 50K subscribers I basically chalked it up to a mixture of bringing on a few big sites (which we did), a massive recent spike in overall activity at Grey’s Anatomy News (main character may or may not have died last episode) and a glitch at FeedBurner.

Not that there are often glitches at FeedBurner, but I simply didn’t connect the dots.

See, we’ve been FeedBurner Enterprise (ie: FeedFoundry) subscribers for about 3 months now. When we started, we had about 18K subscribers to our feeds. Before this morning we had passed the 30K mark. Not bad for 3 months. But, based on 3 months of experience, seeing a more than 50% increase overnight simply didn’t seem … normal.

Then I saw Stowe’s post on his FeedBurner numbers increasing by a massive amount. I figured Stowe had tracked down the culprit. While reading his post I suddenly realized the connection: Google starts sending subscriber numbers, FeedBurner subscribers go up. Duh!

Turn out Stowe figured it out as well.

This is actually interesting, as I hadn’t looked at feed reader breakdowns in ages. I’d basically figured Bloglines accounted for 1/3 of subscribers - as that’s what it’s been for years and years.

Things have changed. Drastically.

Google is now, or is soon set to be, the world’s #1 feed reading software / destination / feature. Now, granted, the Google “FeedFetcher” numbers are for a half-dozen Google services. But, I’d assume the count is based on Google Account usage, and not usage by individual service. I’d assume. I could be wrong. If I am, there’s a slight inflation here (as some users would use feeds on multiple services).

Either way, this is a fairly fundamental shift in the feed reader market. Not a bad shift, as it at least partially means that feeds are becoming more mainstream. But it is a shift.

A few other folk, including Mashable and Danny are talking about this. Check out the Techmeme artifact for more posts.

For those who are wondering what that shift looks like, here are our top 10 feed readers, with subscriber numbers (and overall market share for our readers):

Google Feedfetcher: 14375 (29%)
Bloglines: 7774 (16%)
Firefox Live Bookmarks: 6062 (14%)
Newsgator Online: 2644 (5%)
Google Desktop: 2313 (5%)
My Yahoo: 1678 (3%)
Netvibes: 1625 (3%)
A Java-based feed reader: 1153 (3%)
Rojo: 955 (2%)
Windows RSS Platform: 779 (2%)

One of the great things, though, is that we can actually break these numbers down by some vertical-specific info. I won’t do this for all our channels, but to give a brief view into some different demo/psycho-graphics, here are 3 of our largest channels with their top 3 feed readers:

Business: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Technology: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Entertainment: Firefox Live Bookmarks, Google Desktop, Google Feedfetcher

And a few of our smaller channels, with diverse interests?

Arts & Crafts: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, My Yahoo
Personal Development: Google Feedfethcer, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Travel & Culture: Bloglines, Google Feedfetcher, unidentified (followed by Firefox Live Bookmarks)

Time will tell what all this means, of course. I just find it interesting how quickly Google went from something fairly secondary to, quite literally, the single most important feed platform (as it’s more than a single reader) for us here at b5media.

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POSTED IN: General