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%)
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)