A Challenge to the RSS Industry: RSS Stats Unacceptable

By Rok Hrastnik

Forrester Research released the final "The State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2005" report on August 2nd, which claims that only 2% of Americans online use RSS, based on a survey of more than 68,000 American households.
These numbers are of course underpreciated, as the data only includes the people that are knowingly using RSS, and not the internet users that might not even know they are subscribing to feeds, as they are using services such as My.Yahoo!, which already fully integrated RSS.
So how relevant is the 2% figure?
Let's simply take a look at some of the more recent stats released by various research companies and others, pertaining to the adoption and use of RSS.

87% of influencers use RSS (Nooked)

Only 3% of Internet users use RSS (Jupiter Research)

11% of blog readers use RSS (Nielsen/NetRatings)

Only 2% of all Americans online use RSS (Forrester Research)

9% of Americans have a good idea of what RSS is (PEW)

12% of all Americans online use a variety of RSS readers (Jupiter Research)

5% of Americans online use RSS (PEW)

It seems that no one can really agree on how many people are really using RSS, knowingly or unknowingly.
For marketers, the situation is nearning the unacceptable phase, with no one really knowing how adopted RSS really is. Which report and research company should we trust?
Perhaps it's really time for us to stop worrying about the research statistics and ask the people who should know best: providers of RSS aggregators, desktop and web-based, and other RSS services.
NewsGator and FeedDemon, Yahoo!, Pluck, Attensa, Bloglines, FireFox, Pheedo, Nooked, Syndicate IQ and others ... please save us of our misery --> start providing some real-life numbers on how many people are really using RSS.
This is not simply a desire of one marketer, but the need of the entire industry, which cannot continue developing until we have some reliable numbers from the actual source on how much adoption RSS has achieved.





About the author:
Marketers and publishers interested in exploring the marketing opportunities provided by RSS and even advanced RSS tactics can receive the needed education from Hrastnik's book, available at his website: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/bl/


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