14 DAY TRIAL // For the past months and seeing some resurgence lately, RSS as a medium for consuming and discovering news and other content has been pretty much left for dead, with everyone claiming that Twitter and for a while FriendFeed replaced to a certain degree by Facebook now are all much better and faster ways of getting the latest stories. Now, the Read Write Web blog has come out with an analysis of the state of the market and the conclusion is grim, Google Reader dominates the market for feed readers and that the market itself is in "disaray." Blogger Louis Gray though offers an alternative view, claiming that, even though the reader market may be in bad shape, RSS is doing great and people are using it in greater numbers than ever.
First things first, RWW analyzed the data from its own feeds to find out what readers are the most popular and what their market share is. It came as no surprise that Google dominates the field with Reader managing to have more users than the following two readers, Bloglines and Netvibes, combined. FriendFeed came in fourth place, but the site has been bleeding users for the past months since it has been acquired by Facebook, so it may not hold its place for long. This leads the blog to conclude that the RSS readers are quickly becoming irrelevant and that Google Reader will increase its dominance in the future.
Gray though sees this not as a sign that the technology is dying, but that the market is reaching maturity. "With the world watching Twitter's top names and their Suggested User List-boosted following counts cross well into seven digits, data from FeedBurner and other sources shows RSS counts climbing - in some cases dramatically - for nearly all blogs, and a number of them also sport reader counts in the millions. While the independent market for RSS readers may be in bad shape, having ceded ground to Google Reader, RSS as a utility is actually growing. It's not going down, not by a long shot," he writes.
He goes on to offer some statistics about popular blogs and sites and the trend is revealing and universal, everyone has seen huge growth in subscribers this year, many doubling their numbers in less than a year. What's more, subscriber numbers are in many cases comparable or bigger than the follower numbers for those very same sites on Twitter, with some notable exceptions. His conclusion is that even though Twitter or Facebook may be getting all the attention, at the end of the day, most people are still using RSS and things aren't changing any time soon.