Total RSS Universe: 3.5 Million?
by Patrick Ruffini :: January 22nd, 2007 12:27 amHow many people are using RSS in the U.S.?
I’m not sure how that breaks down, but according to Nielsen//NetRatings, approximately 3.5 million people visited Feedburner in the last month. That number has been steadily rising over the last several months.
Am I stopping there? I will in terms of not seeking to expand the universe beyond that, though I’ll attack the question from another angle below. Feedburner is ubiquitous enough that most people interested in RSS feeds probably has one of its blogs in their library. The average RSS user will likely ping it at least once in any given month.
But I’m not interested in the total number that may have been exposed to RSS in any given month. I’m interested in the number of people actively managing their subscriptions.
So I approached this from a slightly different angle — abstracting the total RSS audience from traffic to the most popular web-based client.
Bloglines rings in at a monthly unique audience of about 300,000. Bloglines is about 20% of my readers — but comes in at 12% among the much hardier sample of TechCrunch readers, according to this incredibly useful post on the Feedburner blog from last September. I could also see how Bloglines is less popular in the tech space given the proliferation of Mac-based platforms. For the sake of argument, let’s just guesstimate Bloglines market share at 15%.
That would imply an active RSS subscriber base of 2 million.
And according to that post about TechCrunch, approximately 25% of subscribers will check in on their feeds on any given day. Depending on how you read these numbers, that’s an RSS-addled daily audience of between 500,000 to a cool million.
Before we start proclaiming the Death of Email from the rooftops, let’s remember that RSS is still in the early adopter phase. But judging from Feedburner’s skyrocketing traffic, it’s a medium with great, great potential still.
Tagged: bloglines 
feedburner rss
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[…] Last month, I pegged the RSS universe in the U.S. at 3.5 million. I did this by looking at Nielsen’s monthly unique number for Feedburner. If you want to work backwards from another point of reference, dividing Bloglines uniques by Bloglines marketshare also yields a number in the low millions. […]