I am someone who loves using RSS, but at the same time as a business owner I find RSS is not living up to its current billing.

Whilst I haven’t mentioned RSS day before on this blog, I have known about Daniel’s plans for a month, and I might have been the first one to suggest using a dedicated site to promote RSS Day. This avoids what might be looked on as purely an attempt at linkbait.

Premium RSS Content

• I want to be able to provide premium content delivered by RSS
• I also want to consume premium content delivered by RSS.
• I am honestly sick of paying for access to content, but having to visit each site in turn to actually read it.

The premium content is currently served behind pay walls, as web content, PDFs, sometimes even video. All of this content could easily be delivered by RSS.
It is even often the case that Google is allowed to index this content, and serve advertising on it, but if I want to read it, I have to actually visit the site.

Against Google Business Model

Google makes money serving advertising along side or within content, thus in many ways it serves Google’s long term goals if “all information is free”

Unfortunately some content isn’t “mass market” and takes a huge amount of time in preparation – CPC, CPA & CPM monetization solutions are not sufficient compensation.

In addition, using authentication, it is possible to deliver different content to different users. For Google that would mean that the open rate of individual RSS feeds would be less valuable within their search algorithms.

But That Is What Email Is For

I know people will argue that if you want private delivery of information, email is the perfect choice. There are huge drawbacks.

• Spam filters block content we want to receive – sometimes I even get my contact form messages arriving in Gmail’s spam bin
• Opt-In Mechanisms are confusing for many readers – only 60% of the people who initially requested to receive my blog content by Feedburner’s RSS to Email service actually confirmed their subscription
• CAN SPAM – there are lots of hoops to jump through for commercial email, and these are increasing
• Multimedia – why can’t I watch a YouTube video in Gmail yet?
• Privacy – some people are scared to give out their primary email address

Reading email seems to be a very selective process with significant restraints for security

• You can’t read a “river of email” even though that would be a huge time saver
• I don’t know of an email client that allows you to quickly share emails using a single hotkey combination – it is possible to apply filters for forwarding, but that is less liable to human error when tired, drunk, or when you have a 1 year old on your lap

Suggestions For Google Reader

• Google Reader needs to support some kind of HTTP Authentication for access to secure personal content
• Support for controls that restrict sharing of content to shared public accessible feeds – not just the primary shared feeds, but also label shared feeds

This isn’t the first time I have written about this, in many ways this is a pet topic as it is very much a core feature I want to be able to use for my business both as a provider of premium content, and a consumer.

Corporate Solutions

I know there are corporate solutions available which feature quite extensive control, after all for internal adoption of RSS for company intranets, this level of control is essential.

Many existing consumer RSS Readers support authentication – it isn’t a major programming hurdle, though might consume additional storage resources – I can’t beleive Google lack the resources to make this possible.

Premium content is something that needs to be accessible by consumers, thus I hope that any future solution provided by Google isn’t planned for their premium business solutions.

The Future Of RSS (at least on this blog)

In the near future I plan to deliver premium content by RSS – much of it will still be free of charge – if at that time Google Reader doesn’t support various access controls, I will restrict access and block Google Reader

This might be looked on as extreme, but I first discussed these problems in October 2006

Now Updated
This Really Is How TO Get OPML For Google Reader

For full details see the second half of this article

This isn’t a typical “how To” article, because currently this feature doesn’t exist, but it could with just a little 20% time at Google.

Whilst you can download an OPML file to import into other feed readers, or to upload to the web in another location, you can’t currently access it directly.

Whilst many tech sites are lauding the new blogroll for Google Reader users, it isn’t really very useful, and is without doubt extremely ugly compared to many widgets that use OPML, such as SpringWidgets, or even a work-around previously available.

The Key To OPML With Google Reader

It isn’t some secret hidden interface, but a person, Steve Lacey who created the widget blogroll in his 20% time at Google.

All you need to do is impress upon him that you really would like to do more with your collection of feeds in Google Reader and he might be persuaded to make some small additions to his existing code.

Steve already seems to be receptive to the idea, asking open questions. All that might be required is to make him a blogging superstar with lots of links and comments ;)

Google is meant to be all about “Open” these days but whilst I think they have made some mistakes, there is a chance for one aspect of our online presence to become truly open… and useful.

If you want access to an OPML version of your subscriptions in Google Reader, directly from a server rather than having to export it, I suggest you raise your voices.

Exclusive: How To Get OPML For Google Reader

Sometimes you just have to ask for the right features at the right time, and doors open.

Mihai Parparita from the Google Reader team popped by and gave away the secret to what is currently an unannounced feature of Google Reader, that isn’t currently in the interface but can be accessed.

Actually, OPML export for blogrolls is already supported, we just couldn’t figure out where to put it in the UI. To get at it, look at an existing blogroll URL. For example, here is Steve’s:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript-sub/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds

To get at the OPML version, replace “javascript-sub” with “subscriptions”, giving you:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer

Expect a more extensive tutorial to be added to this story in the next few hours.

Update 2

This doesn’t seem to be quite what we are looking for.

If you access the file via a web browser, you get to download your OPML as a file google-reader-subscriptions.xml

If you access using a web application, such as a tool to check headers, you see that it is being returned as an attachment.

1. Requesting: http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds
GET /reader/public/subscriptions/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.google.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Server Response: 200 OK
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=google-reader-subscriptions.xml
Content-Encoding: gzip
Cache-Control: private
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:21:19 GMT
Server: GFE/1.3
X-Cache: MISS from .
Via: 1.0 .:80 (squid)
Connection: close

This doesn’t work the same way as accessing your Technorati favorites as an opml file such as http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/AndyBeard?format=opml

1. Requesting: http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/AndyBeard?format=opml
GET /faves/AndyBeard?format=opml HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: feeds.technorati.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Server Response: 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:05:33 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: tvisitor=216.154.235.143.1194541533975889; path=/; expires=Tue, 06-Nov-12 17:05:33 GMT; domain=.technorati.com
Cache-Control: max-age=1800
Expires: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:35:37 GMT
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

This isn’t the easily access OPML we are looking for

Example With SpringWidgets

Whilst the OPML will not work when creating a new RSS reader widget, you can force it to work with an existing widget.

If you just provide the OPML file direct from Google Reader, it returns an error.

Update 3

Now comparing this with Bloglines, which also returns the OPML as an attachment

http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=AndrewBeard

Here are the headers returned

1. Requesting: http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=AndrewBeard
GET /export?id=AndrewBeard HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.bloglines.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Server Response: 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:53:38 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6-dev (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6-dev OpenSSL/0.9.7a
P3P: CP=”NOI DSP COR NID CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa OUR STP IND UNI COM NAV INT STA”
Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=export.opml
Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 472
Keep-Alive: timeout=300, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

Lets compare the XML returned

Google returns the following

<opml version="1.0">
    <head><base href="http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds">
        <title>"my-feeds" subscriptions via Steve Lacey in Google Reader</title>
    </head>

Here is the Bloglines Header

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml version="1.1">
<head><base href="http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=AndrewBeard">
    <title>Bloglines Subscriptions</title>
    <dateCreated>Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:58:31 GMT</dateCreated>
    <ownerName>AndrewBeard</ownerName>
</head>

Thus there is a difference in the headers being returned

If you add the following

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

You get a working OPML feed, here is an example
http://andybeard.eu/google-reader-test-opml.xml

First up, for those counting stats such as Darren Rowse, Robert Scoble and Techcrunch here are my numbers.

Google Reader is currently showing 3 different feeds that are all providing the same content, which you might think would be better served as a single number as appears in Feedburner.
Hopefully that will never, ever happen, as those split numbers are incredibly useful.

Why Are There Split Numbers?

It is vital to understand why split numbers occur to fully appreciate how useful this is.

There are 3 main ways people subscribe to your RSS feeds using Google Reader.

1. Using A Subscription Button

   My subscription buttons point to andybeard.eu/feed/ and this is the URL used by feed readers to collect my feed, even though that redirects to Feedburner using the Feedsmith plugin.

2. Autodiscovery

   This is that little orange icon that appears in your browser alongside the URL for RSS subscription. It is handled in different ways by various feed readers. Google Reader evaluates any redirect before you actually subscribe, thus you end up at feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites before making a decision. Historically speaking this isn’t a very good thing to happen, because as a feed publisher you “lose ownership” in some ways of those subscribers, as they are not subscribing to a page on your site that can be moved to somewhere else.

3. Javascript Bookmark

   This again uses the autodiscovery URL in the header of your blog, but for some reason, maybe my own oversight or mistake my autodiscovery URL is andybeard.eu/feed – notice this URL doesn’t have a trailing slash.

RSS Feed Subscription – Evaluation

This is where we gain a unique perspective on Feed Subscription

1. 580 people are subscribed to http://andybeard.eu/feed/ – those people used a subscription button to subscribe to my feed.
2. 196 people are subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites – those are either very long-time subscribers from my time on blogspot, or they used RSS Autodiscovery to subscribe using Google Reader
3. 146 people are subscribed to http://andybeard.eu/feed – those people most likely used a javascript based subscription button in Firefox to subscribe to my feed.

Now if you are very smart, you could use this method to split test subscription methods, and rely on Feedburner for your aggregate data.

This isn’t an attempt to get on a list of SEO blogs or back-slapping.

In this post I am trying to highlight some unique information that no one has ever revealed before, and could be extremely useful.

This isn’t the same as tracking RSS subscriptions, in many ways it is better because the tracking only gives you a click on a button, and doesn’t give you anything from autodiscovery, losing half of the data.

I for one hope Google doesn’t “fix” this “problem” with aggregated feeds, because it could prove to be very useful.

Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others

10 months ago I fired off a heated debate about RSS sharing, and how Google with it’s easy to share feeds could be killing the future of RSS.
Now I say I fired it off, but honestly it would have been a storm in a teacup without Robert Scoble taking part with one of his most controversial headlines.
I think I had about 30 subscribers at the time.

Today Robert is championing the Bill of Rights he signed up for, but unfortunately Google Reader and Google’s recently purchased Feedburner don’t support the level of control over your feeds to allow Robert, and his friends wishes to be fulfilled, and they really only have their selves to blame, for championing Google Reader without encouraging Google to allow for self determination of what happens with the data.

RSS Sharing – Path of Discovery

I already knew that RSS could be protected using RSS Authentication, and that was something Google doesn’t support, but Bloglines does, and they block your ability to share authenticated feeds. +1 Bloglines

Open Social Web is really about applications such as Facebook, and my voyage of discovery into content access control in Facebook actually started quite by accident about a week ago.

Facebook provides a way to get your notification by RSS

The URL looks like this

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=576942190&viewer=576942190&key=10characterkey&format=rss20

Google Reader allows you to add that feed, and share it

Shared item uses javascript, though I could easily also feed it to anywhere, such as a WordPress blog

I could have also shared it in a primary shared feed totally by accident.
Now there currently isn’t any really private information in there, other than allowing others to know who my friends are, and who I am communicating with, but then you wouldn’t want to share your email headers either…

Being allowed to share data doesn’t mean it should be as easy as hitting a hotkey when reading a “river of news”

I Appologise To My Facebook Friends

I will remove the sharing in 24 hours, but I feel it is important to use real data to demonstrate this point because for some reason 99% of the tech industry just didn’t understand it 10 months ago.

Facebook & Bloglines Understand it

Facebook point to their help information on notifications

Lets take a look at what Facebook think about sharing and privacy, and why they implemented specific security measures.

Does this mean that everyone can see all my notes now?

No. Each person that can see your notes on Facebook is given a different RSS or Atom feed URL that is unique for them. Only the notes that they are allowed to see will be syndicated via that URL. If you change your privacy settings or friend links, then all the feeds will be appropriately updated.

Unfortunately those people can share those links by accident

Won’t Bloglines and other similar services make my notes content searchable by the world if my friends enter the URL for my Notes feed into those services?

Atom and RSS feeds from Facebook include the Bloglines Feed Access Control extension , and we set the access parameter to “deny” for all of our feeds. We also indicate in our robots.txt that feeds should not be visited or indexed by bots. The major aggregators and search engines (Bloglines, Technorati, Google, Yahoo!) all appear to respect these directives. If you are very concerned about the possibility of someone seeing your notes that you don’t want him or her to see, we’ve added a privacy option that you can set on your notes privacy page which will prevent any of your Notes from being syndicated in any RSS or Atom feed.

The major search engines do support Robots.txt, though I am not sure robots.txt would be sufficient to stop someone hacking.

Bloglines Feed Access Control extension was introduced last August, and it seems no one in the Technology blogging world really took an interest.
Google Reader certainly doesn’t support it as I have proven above.

People can make all this content searchable by mistake, broadcast it on Twitter etc

Doesn’t providing different URLs to every person that views my notes create inefficiency because services that do aggregation will have to retrieve and store my Notes from multiple feeds?

Yes. This is the only way that we can maintain your privacy settings on a per-viewer basis.

Facebook (and Bloglines) seem to be very keen to support privacy and choice, but Google Reader by not supporting “access:restriction relationship” seems to think privacy (and copyright) is a waste of time.

access:restriction relationship=”deny”

Feedburner is now owned by Google and you would expect them to treat all services the same, and to support initiatives that give content owners a choice in what happens to their content.

They have an interface to allow introduction of sharing control within Feedburner, but for some reason only support the blocking of sharing with a service provided by a Google competitor, Yahoo Pipes.

This adds the following code to your feed, and I currently have on my feed, though I will probably switch back.

<xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex" /><meta xmlns="http://pipes.yahoo.com" name="pipes" content="noprocess" />

this means that it is not indexed, but all links are still followed (so links back to the feed still give me some juice), and is meant to prevent someone using your content in Yahoo Pipes.

Of course it doesn’t….

Once any content enters Google Reader, it can be tagged and filtered automatically, and Google Reader doesn’t include any of the access controls.

I have fed my protected feed into Google Reader, and then shared it
It took me 2 minutes to set that up and is realistically unblockable – any splogger using Google Reader cannot be prevented from taking your content and feeding their “Made for Adsense” sites.

Facebook Opening Up?

Actually they are already wide open, because the various feed readers other than Bloglines are not supporting their controls.
The announcement today of limited search ability doesn’t matter, someone could easily program an app that would allow people to share everything and have everything searchable, without seeking permission from those sharing.

Ownership and Control of RSS Content

10 months ago everyone seemed perfectly happy to slam me and tell me that I was wrong. The tech blogging fraternity thought at that time that once something is in RSS format, you should no longer have control of it, and have no legal right to complain about other people using it.

The more creatively and more personal RSS feeds become, the more control the owners of that content need for how that content is used, either on purpose, or by mistake.
It shouldn’t be possible to hit a hotkey and share Facebook content with 50,000 subscribers, but it is currently possible.

This is about choice, and privacy

This also isn’t the only problem with Feedburner as as I pointed out when Feedburner were purchased by Google.

Update

I have now switched to using a screenshot rather than a live Javascript feed to improve privacy a little

Payola makes the world go around
The world go around
The world go around
Payola makes the world go around
It makes the world go ’round.

All I have replaced is the word “money” with the word “payola” because not all forms of payola are monetary or immediately obvious, but it certainly can have huge value.

Feed readers and Ajax desktops get a huge amount of coverage on many popular tech blogs, probably a lot more so than any other online service. Every minor update to a major RSS platform gets coverage, and hell, I am not immune to this either.

There is a huge benefit in people creating accounts on multiple feedreaders, only to discard them at a later date. The feeds are still being pulled for your account, even if you haven’t logged into it for the last 6 months, and those subscriber numbers are still being reported to Feedburner.

But major blogs there is some additional payola that almost guarantees additional coverage

Default Subscriber Packages

Yes, I am jealous…

Not every feed reader service provides “suggested reading” and default packages, but many do, and it certainly has an effect on subscriber numbers for the major blogs.

Does something like this have an effect on coverage?

I wonder what percentage of subscriptions come from such default subscription packages…

Google Reader currently has a huge market share, and doesn’t provide default subscription options. A lot of those subscribers are created by extensive coverage on Tech blogs, converting people over to Google Reader, or at least encouraging people to test out other services.

There seems to be a huge disparity between subscriber growth rate for those included in such default packages, and those who are not.

Duplicity

This is a fun concept…

Tech sites frequently discuss market share for feed readers. They frequently compare numbers of their own subscribers by providing screenshots of their subscriber numbers.

Obviously it is important to figure as prominently as possible on such a list, so it makes huge financial sense to include the most prominent tech blogs within the default subscriber packages, even if more of your users would most likely be interested in a knitting blog or parenting.

Surely this should be something disclosed when talking about RSS applications?

Techcrunch via Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim (who has a disclosure policy)

p.s. Don’t forget to add me to your Bloglines account, even if you use Google Reader, Pageflakes or Netvibes

Update: I need to make a small correction

There is payola with Google Reader too!

I would like to thank Mike for pointing this out in the comments.

Update2: I used Google Reader’s search function for blogs related to marketing. It is a terrible search feature and there are countless marketing blogs of high quality that are totally missing from the results.

The only time I actually test the Compete Toolbar is when I get an upgrade for it. Firefox detects a new upgrade, downloads it, and switches the toolbar on automatically from its default state on my computer – off.

The reason I keep it switched off is because with the Compete Toolbar switched on, Google Reader doesn’t work. It has been a good 3 months since Paul noted a problem. I just downloaded a new version, and again it doesn’t work with Google Reader on my system.

Compete Statistics

I have been disappointed with Compete Statistics for some time, especially within various niches that are technology related.

I decided to do a little roundup of blogs in the SEO SEM & Make Money Niche – no disrespect to anyone I missed out, page load time is going to suck anyway with all these images. Some sites I checked out and they fell into line with others which have similar Alexa traffic, so I just kept one example.

Problogger.net

Current Alexa Rating:- 2309

Shoemoney.com

Current Alexa Rating:- 1281

Graywolf

Current Alexa Rating:- 4993

Pronet Advertising

Current Alexa Rating:- 10015

Search Engine Journal

Current Alexa Rating:- 4264

John Battelle’s Search Blog

Current Alexa Rating:- 7684

Search Engine Watch

Current Alexa Rating:- 957

TopRank Blog

Current Alexa Rating:- 7610

Andy Beard

Current Alexa Rating:- 32K going on 20k

Statistics Analysis

The Alexa stats just don’t tie up with the Compete stats, even in a similar niche. Why do SEJ and SEW do so much better than Problogger and Shoemoney on Compete scores when both have very high (and legitimate) Alexa scores?
John Battelle stats are fascinating – he has a huge number of subscribers based on his recent stats from a few days ago after Google Reader was included but his Alexa score and number of comments doesn’t match. John seems to have a different kind of reader.

Do corporate intranets and default feeds on start pages (before you sign up) get somehow added to subscriber data?

I have always looked on the number of comments as being a good indication for blogs as to whether Alexa data is consistant, and generally within this niche it is, with the exception of John Battelles stats. I can think of reasons for that, as he is a “trusted” news source.

It should also be noted that Compete is a relatively new service, younger than all of the sites listed. I didn’t include SearchEngineLand specifically because it is a new site and thus might not have been a fair comparison.

As for my own data… wow, I am in the top 1 million now for Compete.

I feel much more inclined to use Alexa data as an indicator over Compete, not only because I can actually use it without breaking Google Reader, but also because the statistics for Alexa at least seem to have some level of consistency.

Time to close Firefox to switch Compete off again until the next update.

Update: I have now added Quantcast figures

Quantcast

Quantcast is a strange entity, in that the figures for traffic can be highly accurate. I know the figures they have for my site are 100% accurate. The reason they have exact data for my site is because I have been running their tracking code on my site for the last month and have my site registered with them.

For sites that aren’t registered and running the tracking code, the data is fairly weak – I am not sure where they get the data from, but it seems to be fairly dubious.

Its another piece of code you end up placing in the footer of your site, and I am sure the tin-foil hat brigade are not too happy about sharing everything about their sites, but it seems Quantcast get the data even if you don’t use their tracking code. It is probably best to register and then decide which data to display.
Lots of data isn’t always displayed for lower ranked sites – that certainly seems to be the case with this site.

From the Quantcast FAQ

How can I fix my site profile?

There is a sure-fire way to improve the accuracy of these numbers: by placing a measurement pixel on your site. Add a pixel and let our technology do the rest. Within just a few days you’ll see more refined, accurate and representative numbers for your site’s audience.

How accurate their ratings are for sites that experience a growth in traffic are unknown, and the drops in reported traffic on some sites are strange. Where you host seems to make a difference with how much data they have if you don’t have the code installed.

Update2: Conversion Rater has been doing a similar analysis trying to create a rankings table based on this data. Unfortunately it isn’t taking into account why some of the metrics data might be totally inaccurate, such as sites not registered with Quantcast.
Clarification: Pat does mention screwy data for sites not including Quantcast code, but the way he says it suggests that this is affecting those on his list that have a 15,000,000 rating. Of the 16 sites on the list, only 4 might have registered with Quantcast. It is just not worth using the figure. Comepete seems to be all over the place as well, with 6 sites not having any data at all.

Yesterday it was announced that Google have managed to untangle their various crawlers and can now report feed usage stats to services like Feedburner. Further coverage on Techcrunch, Mashable, SearchEngineLand and Techmeme.

FeedBurner Readership Prior to Inclusion of Google Reader Stats

It is unfortunate that I don’t have screen captures of all of the following, although I am sure the specific sites I mention will be reporting their own data shortly.

Techcrunch – from memory had between 150k and 170k subscribers being reported
Mashable – from memory had approximately 51k subscribers

For my own stats it is much easier because I have a FeedBurner Pro account

“Reach” currently seems to correspond with how many clicks you have on the site, and not how many unique readers or how many page views on the site.

Here are my MyBlogLog stats from the same day:-

FeedBurner Readership After Inclusion of Google Reader Stats

Techcrunch

Whilst my estimate of previous reported subscribers might be out by 10K, overnight Techcrunch have gained approximately 100K subscribers. This is close to a 60% gain

Mashable

Mashable seem to have gained around 10K subscribers, or approximately a 20% gain

Andy Beard

In this case I have more detailed information

The addition of Google Reader Stats represents a 32% gain

Conclusions

There seems to be a huge variation in the demographics for each site which is actually very refreshing. Techcrunch obviously have a very high population of Google Reader subscribers, and they have given Google Reader significant coverage. Mashable have also given Google Reader significant coverage, but their readership is potentially different, with more emphasis on social networks, and potentially a younger audience.

My own site is relatively new, and also caters for a different demographic audience, of people relatively new to blogging, and also a lot of people who are less familiar with reading RSS feeds.

Whilst the information I have isn’t conclusive, and such figures might only be forthcoming if Feedburner aggregate their statistics and make them public, it seems to me that Google Reader may well have the largest user base in the Feed Reader market, less than 6 months after they updated their user interface.
Google Reader certainly seems very popular among new adopters, and that is actually the largest potential market.

I am not alone in drawing these conclusions, as it seems Steve Boyd and Jeremy Wright (B5 Media) have reported similar gains.

With B5 media it will be interesting which properties gained the most overnight. I have a similar but slightly different demographic to Problogger.net.
Darrens subscribers seem to have shot up by more than the average for B5 Media – Before the Google Reader statistics were introduced, Darren had quite significant gains in readership, and was approaching close to 12K readers.

He is now approaching 19K subscribers:-

This is close to a 60% gain overnight

Jeremy also gave a very interesting breakdown of the top subscription method by each demographic audience:-

One of the great things, though, is that we can actually break these numbers down by some vertical-specific info. I won’t do this for all our channels, but to give a brief view into some different demo/psycho-graphics, here are 3 of our largest channels with their top 3 feed readers:

Business: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Technology: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Entertainment: Firefox Live Bookmarks, Google Desktop, Google Feedfetcher

And a few of our smaller channels, with diverse interests?

Arts & Crafts: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, My Yahoo
Personal Development: Google Feedfethcer, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Travel & Culture: Bloglines, Google Feedfetcher, unidentified (followed by Firefox Live Bookmarks)

I wonder if other blog networks will be so open with their information, as I find this fascinating, especially the lack of IE7 users in Jeremy’s stats, despite its supposed lead over Firefox.

I should also link over to the Feedburner blog, because they explain how their statistics work.

Update 06/25/2007

Duncan Riley just linked through to this post in an article on Techcrunch, so I thought it would be appropriate to make a small update.

The initial stats listed above are from 4 months ago, lets see how things have changed.

The obvious thing looking at the follow statistics is that my subscriber base has more than doubled, in fact I could claim my number of subscribers is growing faster than Techcrunch!

The fact that Techcrunch gain more subscribers per day than I have in total is just a minor issue of very little importance.

Among my own readership, Google Reader’s market share has actually increased to 38%, and because my subscriber base has increased, those numbers are now from a bigger market sample, though admittedly still a very heavy technology focus.

I should also note that those numbers are not influenced at all by default subscription packages from many feed readers, which can have a dramatic effect on subscriber number balance and the total number of active subscribers that are reported.

Yesterday I happened upon something maybe of significance when I spotted Nick Baum who is the project manager for Google Reader had created an account on MyBlogLog for his private blog. It should be noted that he doesn’t discuss Google matters on his private blog.

I did however drop him a question via the MyBlogLog message system.

Nick did answer that message in private, but I couldn’t publish the answer yesterday because it was a private message, and might well have jumped the gun on an official announcement.

From the Google Reader Blog

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

Great… wonderful… amazing news – thanks Google Reader team!

Now for Some Speculation

You might notice I bolded the following:-

and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds

This is pure speculation, but 2007 has just started and a lot is possible.

• Blogger – Google already have avatars for Blogger accounts, but don’t have a much of a social network wrapped around Blogger interaction. Even WordPress.com have much better “community” between their bloggers with shared tag feeds and various dashboard features.
• Google Personalized Homepage – this doesn’t have any form of sharing yet, unlike Pageflakes or Netvibes
• Google Talk – allows you to set an avatar to be displayed
• Google Co-op CSE – Again, you can join as an editor of a Google Co-op search engine and it will display your avatar
• Gmail allows you to set an avatar



• YouTube – Yes Google already own one social network, but it isn’t yet fully integrated with the multitude of other Google services – login at YouTube isn’t yet unified – I wonder how far that is from becoming a reality
• Google Video – currently no social features
• Personal Search – Would Google ever provide users with the ability to share what they have been search for to friends and family – yes I know there are privacy concerns, depending on what you search for ;) – you could have an option “share this search”
• Google Reader Shared Feeds – I don’t share items, because I don’t support the fact that publishers don’t have a choice about their full content being shared. Snippets isn’t a problem, as long as there will be a way to warn you before you share private information you might subscribe to.
• Groups – Google Groups are not really integrated very well with your online experience and either you have to fill up your mailbox with unwanted emails, or you have to make a concious decision to visit.
• Picassa – You can share your photos, but again it is something separate from other Google Services
• Google Documents – lots of sharing possible
• Google Calendar – you can share your calendar, and this is one of the strongest features, but it is not well integrated with other services

Yahoo are looking strongly at integration of services. They have APIs for most of their social services, have just released Yahoo Pipes, and they purchased MyBlogLog.

Google does provide a lot of “behind the scenes” APIs for services, and it is possible to create a mashup service if you trust someone else with your Google account info – I wouldn’t personally share my Google account info with anyone – well my wife can retrieve my password if required, though she doesn’t have that need currently.
I didn’t list private services such as Adwords, Adsense and Analytics – maybe those could become a more private portal. It would certainly be useful to merge the data with more than just a hack.

Google is Missing Glue

You know… that substance that joins things together… and makes them sticky.

Google seem to be keeping very quiet about social network plans. Googlers have always been very good at keeping secrets, and have extreme job loyalty. I would think the majority of people who have left employment at Google over the last few years probably did so because they will probably never have to work again or for health reasons. Yes some people whose company has been acquired eventually leave, but financial security does allow a few entrepreneurial freedoms.

My prediction – sometime during 2007 Google will announce a major social networking platform that provides the glue between all their vast array of services.

But it’s hard to know exactly how popular it’s gotten. FeedBurner doesn’t track it yet, so we can’t compare the subscriber numbers to other readers. We’ve noticed a significant jump in referrals from Google Reader, though. Enough to suggest that it is as large or larger than Bloglines already.

This slant is slightly incorrect

FeedBurner Can’t Track It Yet

It isn’t FeedBurner’s fault that they are not providing readership data for Google Reader as they state clearly in their interface.

This isn’t a technical hurdle, lots of very small companies that provide desktop or web based RSS readers supply this data to FeedBurner.

It seems obvious to me that whilst Google are happy to collect lots of data, and even give you fancy graphs of your own reading habits, they are not inclined to give this information to publishers.

Effectively, once your content is picked up by Google, it enters a black hole.

To pre-empt any tags, here are mine.

But it should be noted

1. This is just after Christmas
2. I tend to read more posts as a percentage on blogs that post less
3. I read a river of headlines rather than a river of news
4. I split my reading between Google Reader and Pageflakes