This Way App

American Demographics, Sept 1, 2004 by Noah Rubin Brier

One of the problems with distributing this way, is that at this point, quantifying usage for RSS is a very difficult undertaking. Because aggregators tend to check for updates from feeds at time intervals, e.g., they'll check a feed every half hour, a hit doesn't necessarily mean a view. "Probably the biggest business challenge of RSS is the lack of concrete knowledge about usage. I have a sense of how much traffic I see from the feed and it's risen every month this year and it's growing around the company. However, I can't tell whether that [growth] comes from 100,000 people, 50,000 people or a really active 10,000," explains John Roberts, associate vice president, product development for CNET News.com. CNET's tech savvy News.com is presumed to be one of the more popular RSS feeds. News.com has seen huge increases in RSS traffic in the past few months, jumping to over 5.4 million requests during a week in June from 4.2 million requests in a week in March. While that number doesn't necessarily reflect the total number of users of the News.com RSS, it certainly indicates the growth in popularity of the feed.

Chicago-based FeedBurner is trying to fill that quantitative hole in the market by giving RSS publishers some hard data. "If publishers run their feed through us, we track all the clicks that come through the feed and report that to them. We can provide detailed statistics tracking the usage of your feed: How many readers you have, when it's being accessed, what they're clicking, etcetera," says Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner. This lack of reliable usage data is a sure sign that RSS is still in its infancy. While it is a potentially powerful tool, most experts believe the technology is within 12 to 36 months of moving past it's early adopter phase to wider consumer use.

"Right now, the audience [for RSS] is bloggers and aggregators as opposed to 'regular Joes.' But I think that's beginning to change as people know more about it and get a better sense of it," explains Eric Easter, senior manager, communications for WashingtonPost.com. "Right now, the page views are more likely to come through a blog, by people linking through to The Washington Post."

Early adopters of RSS tend to be bloggers or blog readers, and are a highly influential bunch. In a recent online survey of over 17,000 blog readers, Blogads found that over 43 percent of respondents said friends would describe them as "an opinion maker." Blogads is a company that helps bloggers place ads on their sites. Easter and other publishers providing RSS are relying on these opinion leaders to send readers back to their sites. The survey also showed that these blog readers are wealthier than many would have imagined, with their demographic profile indicating that nearly 40 percent bring in $90,000 or more a year. Of course, the real money in RSS will come in the future, as it moves out of the early adopter stages.

Mark Fletcher is one of those early adopters. He is best known for his previous company, ONElist, which eventually was bought out and became Yahoo! Groups. Obviously, Fletcher has a knack for creating a useful product that fits a niche in the market. His new product, Bloglines, is a Web-based RSS aggregator that he created for the same reason he created ONElist seven years ago: he wanted it. "In late 2001, I found I was visiting about 100 Web sites on a regular basis that had items I was interested in. I wanted to see if there was a solution to that, and I found it in RSS and aggregation. At that point there was no easy Web-based service to subscribe to all these. So I created a site to address my own RSS needs, which became Bloglines in July 2003." In one short year, Bloglines has become the most popular aggregator, according to FeedBurner, consistently topping its weekly charts. Though both Fletcher and FeedBurner declined to share specific numbers of users, Fletcher did report that the number is in the "tens of thousands." According to comScore Media Metrix, 97,000 people visited Bloglines.com in June of this year.