RSS Heading Toward Mainstream Adoption
RSS subscribers are finally reaching the point where the numbers are meaningful.
Recently a couple of industrious souls have compiled lists of blogs with large numbers of RSS subscribers, using statistics from RSS tracking service, FeedBurner.
You can find one list of the Top 100 feeds over at Self Made Minds. Frantic Industries has its list of the Top 40 feeds.
As you can see from the lists, some sites have hundreds of thousands of RSS subscribers. Many more have tens of thousands of subscribers. And these are only partial lists, as they include only sites that reveal their RSS subscriber numbers.
What’s more, the pace of growth has accelerated. It seems like just a few weeks ago that I noticed the TechCrunch feed had around 375,000 subscribers. I blinked for a moment and now it has 411,000.
The rumor this week that Google is acquiring FeedBurner for $100 Million cash puts even more emphasis on the importance of RSS. Obviously Google thinks RSS is going to be big if they are acquiring a feed tracking and management service for so much cash.
If you do not yet have a website (such as a blog) that offers RSS feeds, it’s past time to get on board this trend. This kind of activity is yet more evidence that RSS readership is poised to move past the early adopters toward the mainstream.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Wow, $100 million to buy FeedBurner? Amazing. I’m new to the RSS feeds but do see the increasing usefullness coming from that technology. I wonder how Google’s aquisition will affect this?
May 26th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Huge adoption no doubt. Its great to see folks are getting on the bandwagon with RSS. Consumption habits are still all over the place, but the key is that RSS based content is being subscribed to and delivered.
- Greg
May 26th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
I hope this means that we will all start making some money from all our RSS subsribers.
May 27th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
[…] RSS Heading Toward Mainstream Adoption: Anita Campbell talks about the growth of RSS feeds and how they’re becoming vitally important to blogs and websites that distribute information. […]
May 29th, 2007 at 1:45 am
No doubt, one of the easiest ways to widely dissipate data and information. Keeping a utilitarian perspective, I could see the benefits of widespread adoption by business community. There are umpteen possibilities, both in disspating business data in a secured manner, and in interpreting the feeds and acting on them in an automated fashion.
May 29th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Sanjay, I agree. Businesses get benefits from two sides:
(1) you can disseminate your content (and marketing messages) more widely using RSS; and
(2) you can stay up to date on market developments and competitive intelligence through monitoring other RSS feeds.
Sounds like good reasons to be using RSS feeds, either as a creator of feeds or as a subscriber of them.
Anita
May 30th, 2007 at 10:13 am
I have to admit that I have been ignorant as to what RSS was and how it worked. Those RSS icons are popping up on numerous websites I visit. Thanks for the link to learn more. I did my homework and now I am ready to explore using rss.
May 31st, 2007 at 4:56 pm
[…] Anita Campbell, who has an excellent blog on Small Business, has a recent piece worth reading on the subject of RSS mainstreaming. […]
June 2nd, 2007 at 2:06 pm
[…] RSS Heading Toward Mainstream Adoption […]
November 5th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Just doing a little research about how RSS can help the SMB market and I came across this story. I see I am a few months behind but still good stuff and thanks for the info.