How do you read your RSS feeds? Chances are, you use either Bloglines or Google Reader, the two market leaders. A recent report, ‘Google Reader Slowly Closing on Bloglines‘ by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise shows how the gap is closing:
Hitwise doesn’t show market share of blog readers directly, but market share of total internet usage; according to this calculation, Bloglines has a 40% lead on Google reader’s market share of internet visits.
These stats are more or less mirrored on RSS4Lib. Looking at my user stats for May 21, 2008, this blog had a total of 1851 feed subscribers, of whom 831 were from Bloglines and 568 were from Google Reader. (See my Counting RSS Subscribers post from a year ago where I discuss my methodology.) This translates into Bloglines having a 44.9% share of my feed subscribers to Google’s 30.1% share, or 49% more than Google. Netvibes is 3rd for aggregators among RSS4lib subscribers (with an almost 13% share of RSS4Lib feed subscribers), while Rojo (3rd overall, according to Hitwise) is a far distant contender for RSS4Lib readers with 8 subscribers.
I’m a diehard Bloglines user myself but I see myself slipping into the minority. What tool do you use, and why?