Tom’s Garage

Rich Skrenta from the excellent Topix.net put up some interesting numbers indicating the most popular RSS feed readers that click through on stories. A few important pieces about the numbers: They represent click-throughs, not the fetching of RSS feeds. And they’re of course only associated with clicks to stories on Topix.net so the data may not be as useful in gaining a true insight into market share.

The number one client is Newsgator but it’s difficult to tell if it is their online service or client side application. The next two seem to be web-based readers which indicates to me that more and more people will be reading their RSS via their browser versus a desktop application. This is something I hope will spread further as it lightens the load on blogs serving the RSS. If you think about 10,000 users accessing through one service versus 10,000 using a desktop client, you can imagine where the savings come from. The MyYahoo service will only have to get one copy of a feed which might be read by hundreds of people while each of the 10,000 client side pass will grab that feed individually. I know folks are working on spreading the load and of course you can outsource your feeds to someone like FeedBurner so client side apps will not hammer you. I still think the future is online feed reading.

Tags: Main Page

This entry was posted by tom on Friday, October 29th, 2004 at 3:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.