I was looking at the page in Feedpress1 today which breaks down subscribers by which RSS reader they use, and it seemed worth sharing. I don’t know if my results are normal or not, but my stats looked like this:
- NewsBlur: 34%
- Feedly: 16%
- Feed Wrangler: 14%
- Google Reader: 13%
- Feedbin: 8%
- NetNewsWire: 4%
- Other: 11%
The readers which were only a couple of percentage points that I grouped into other were: Fever, The Old Reader, Bloglovin, SimplePie, Apple-PubSub, Shrook, NewsGatorOnline, Tiny Tiny RSS, Stringer, Reeder, feedzirra, rss2email, UniversalFeedParser, Downcast, and throttle.2
A few things jumped out at me:
- NewsBlur is more than double the next closest with 34%, but the top few seem pretty competitive.
- I thought Fever (what I'm using right now) and The Old Reader (because I'd heard of it) would be higher, but both had just a few people using them.
- I have no idea why Google Reader still shows up, but it's a pretty high percentage. I guess that means the number of subscribers is 13% lower than what's reported since Google Reader is shut down.
- For an app that's still in public beta and doesn't have any syncing, NetNewsWire did surprisingly well.
- A small group of people are still reading RSS in Safari/Apple Mail, which was removed in Mountain Lion.
- I'd never heard of a bunch of the readers in the "other" category.
I’d be interested to see other peoples stats to figure out how typical my results are. My entirely unfounded guess is that these numbers are not typical for some reason due to who my subscribers are or where they came from. I see people talking about all of the top three or four in roughly equal balance, so it’s hard for me to imagine that NewsBlur isn’t just a little more popular, but more than twice anything else.3 I suspect that if I had a Daring Fireball sized audience the numbers might be distributed a lot more evenly, but I could be wrong.
- Feedpress is an alternative to Feedburner that you pay for, has better reporting, is easier to move away from, and probably won't go away for no reason. ↩
- It probably says a lot about who reads my blog that at least three of these are open source projects you need to compile yourself. ↩
- Although it's a great service and might deserve to be. Of the ones I've tried it'd be the easiest to recommend to non-hardcore tech people. ↩