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FeedBurner: MyYahoo leads in delivering RSS Feed clicks, Google Leads in Views

Posted by: Heather Green on February 22

Following up on the buzz about Google’s announcement last weekend that it would publish RSS feed subscription numbers so that folks would be able to see how many readers they have, the feed tracking and management service FeedBurner did an analysis of its data to help answer a question that’s bubbling up: Who will be the new market share leader for the feed aggregator market?

Feedburner argues that total subscriptions don’t give you enough information. So it maps out who the leaders are in terms of engagement, or how many views and clicks feeds get. This, though, it admits isn’t as straigtforward as folks might like because of the different ways that the aggregators show the feeds.

MyYahoo! leads based on clicks back to a site, while Google is the leader based on views. FeedBurner argues that clicks is a better statistic for measuring market share since it shows who is engaged with the feeds. (Apparently based on the comment below, this isn’t what the company thinks, rather how their pr person positioned it.)


The basic on clicks:
MyYahoo! 54% market share
Google 21%
Bloglines 11%

The basics on views:
Google 59% market share
Bloglines 33%
NewsGator and Netvibes 3%

And of course a note from FeedBurner that’s necessary in this fragmented world: The data “reflects Web-based aggregators only, not client-based feed readers, widgets, and email, which we’ll address in a different post.” And of course, this data is obviously based on FeedBurner’s sample, not the entire galaxy of publishers. That said they say they track 604,533 from 347,000 bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers.

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Reader Comments

Rick Klau

February 22, 2007 12:49 PM

Hi Heather -

Thanks for the comments, glad you found our info useful. One comment on the clicks vs. views discussion: I don't think that clicks are necessarily better than views - I think 'engagement' encompasses both. So many things can affect a clickthrough - whether a post has full text or excerpts, whether the post includes additional interactive elements (like our FeedFlare), how many feeds the reader subscribes to - that I don't think it should be the only metric used to determine how engaged an audience is. Indeed, if people religiously read a publisher's content in their feed reader, I'd think that they're just as engaged as if they'd repeatedly visited the publisher's site.

Ultimately, it's important to see both sides of the equation to know whether feeds are driving a more engaged audience or not.

--Rick

Rob Mark

February 22, 2007 01:32 PM

As a relatively new blogger Heather, I don't particularly care for either Google or Feedburner's explanation although we use Feedburner at our site for a baseline of some sort of measurement.

They are both trying to figure out a way to convert new media - in this case blogs - into old media measurement, which I consider , market share, CPM or even clicks for that matter.

It often seems we spend more time trying to justify the dollars spent on advertising than what we're trying to say.

Heck, Motorola just realized that chasing marketshare is pointless and I don't think it holds much weight either because none of it tells me what I really want to know, which is how many people within our industry - aviation for us - have we actually influenced.

Bill Flitter

February 22, 2007 08:16 PM

We did a similar analysis in our network at Pheedo, and we found Google's influence varied by category. Details here: http://www.pheedo.info/archives/000401.html

For example, Google had the biggest impact for Automotive publishers. Google has emerged as the #4 online online aggregator overall, behind NewsGator, MyYahoo! and Bloglines in terms of number of overall subscribers reported. What is interesting to note in our data is while NewsGator has the highest total number of subscriptions per feed, Google touches more feeds than all other online aggregators

Thanks,
Bill Flitter
Pheedo

Karl

February 1, 2009 06:13 PM

This was extremely informative. Obviously I should choose Yahoo if I want clicks back, but what about conversions vs. Google?

Maybe I should choose both to see in more detailed who converts more. Just a thought. Classifieds TOP Scret. http://www.ClassifiedsTopSecret.com

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In Blogspotting Senior Writer Stephen Baker and Associate Editor Heather Green take a look at how cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society. Whether its blogs or wikis, data crunching or data targeting, technology’s advances are reshaping the world that we live in.

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