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Of Internet Users, Only 4% Knowingly Use RSS
yogikoudou writes "Recent research conducted by Yahoo! and Ipsos reveals that while 12% of surveyed Yahoo users know what RSS is, only 4% of surveyed Internet users use it (PDF) (and know they use it).
Podcasting is also reviewed, with the conclusion that 2% of surveyed people use it.
The increasing number of blogs should go with an increasing number of syndicated readers, as they are now an important part of the web." I've said it before, I'll say it again- if RSS was called SpeedFeed every user would have to have it.
4% know what the heck RSS is, is a lot.
All these Web2.0 companies thinking they're targetting the general Internet public with their RSS, podcasting etc... mashups are only targetting the high-end users of the Internet, and these are the users that only sign-up once, try it for a min or two, then dump it and move on to the next greatest thing.
I hit a couple of dozen news websites daily. Every RSS feed is different, some give titles some give summaries. Why use it.
I have tried I usually find it more cumbersome to read RSS then click on the link to articles i want to read than going to each website doing a much more through san of everything shown and opening what i want to read in tabs. There is nothing RSS provides that can't be had faster with other methods.
Maybe i just haven't found a good RSS reader yet. They all seem to me to be lacking something.
But that is only my opinion. I don't do podcasts either though I can see where those could be useful. Of course I don't listen to portable music so they don't help either.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
In my opinion, the problem with RSS adoption is not the name. It is the fact that employing RSS is really a pretty fundamental change to the way people use the internet.
Most people are used, I think, to giong online and surfing over to their usual bouquet of sites and checking those. The content provider effectively has to "pull" the content consumers in to the content.
RSS on the other hand, is "pushed" out to the recipients. Sure, people still have to surf to the site to get the feed URL, but it's still broadly a push content strategy.
I realize this doesn't sound like much of a change, but for many less sophisticated internet users, the concept of having the news come to you rather than having to go to the news is not familiar.
As an additional point, I suspect that dedicated RSS users will tend to have tens and often hundreds of feeds to sift through. Most people just don't want or can't handle that much information. As a consequence, it is not al that attractive to them.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Why is this surprising? Everyone knows where to find the news they're interested in, and blogs are only read by people who blog themselves, i.e. a *very small* percentage of internet users. Noone else finds blogs important; bloggers hyping blogging is just one big circle jerk. For anyone who is not either a blogger or a news junkie, RSS has little to no use.
To me it seems just as bothersome to load an rss reader as it is to load the websites in a browser, ive never understood the massive hype surounding RSS.
/. RSS feed, but most people read it from the front page. Why? because they can't be bothered with RSS and a regular web page works just as well.
/. readers prefer to reload the front page every 30 seconds, instead of waiting for the RSS feed to get updated, despite that the RSS version should theorically bring them new stories faster.
Exactly. For example, there's a
But I think the real flaw in RSS is the very concept it implements, the "push technology". People don't like information to be pushed at them. They want to retrieve (pull) it themselves. That's the same behaviour that explains why people don't like ads shoved in their mailboxes, and prefer to ask the salesmen about this or that product: the pitch is the same, but in one case, the information is asked by the customer first. That's also why
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The reason I don't use RSS is because the sites I visit I tend to read every story. I visit a fairly small number of blogs/newsites that I know have quality content. I tend to get most of my news from the (hardcopy) newspaper, though, so on the web I'm mainly looking at blogs. RSS is usefull if you want to sift through a lot of content (i.e. the user should have several tens of feeds for RSS to be usefull, and not read all the stories in all the feeds).
The whole thing just confuses the crap out of me. If I want to see what's on a site, why wouldn't I just GO to the site and see?
I hate when I hear people talking about how great RSS is because frankly, it's nonsensical as far as I'm concerned. My own web site uses RSS because it's part of the package. If I had to put any thought into making it work though it'd be off. Fortunately for whatever fraction of that 4% of Internet users who understand and use RSS who actually read my site (both of you) it's all automatic.
And 4% of a billion is still a number I'd like to see on my next paycheque. I hate when people use percentages to make numbers seem artificially low.
Poor RSS. They mean well. It's almost too bad that there's no need for it. It's a rehash of that "push vs. pull" tech we heard so much about. It's obviously going nowhere, few people understand how to utilize it, fewer people use it, nobody needs it. Unless the RSS feed is from my bank account, showing me withdraws in real time on my cellphone, I don't see myself using it either.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
RSS is no more push than pressing F5 on the homepage; it's just that the RSS reader presses F5 again and again for you. If you hit the slashdot RSS url too often, you even get blocked. One of the reasons RSS isn't really that sexy is that you still have to go through a list to see of any of it is interesting, and for the full "push" effect (even though it's just automated pull) you'd have to keep your PC on all the time. RSS readers on mobile phones might change this (which makes a bit more sense since an RSS XML document will be easier to display on there than a fully fledged homepage), but only if you don't have to pay for data by the byte.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
For example, what the hell is up with firefox's use of LiveBookmark? Why is it such an unmitigated pain in the ass to add an rss feed to firefox? What is the problem with firefox's current (1.0.7) implementation of bookmarks? Okay, I guess I'm bitching here a bit about firefox, but its default implementation of rss is not yet there yet. That, and that alone, is the reason why only 2% of users are doing the rss thing.
Besides that, for some sites, clicking on a feed displays a menu with very little information. Slashdot is a good example, I can read a list of article titles via the rss feed (this article still not available), but you know, as with slashdot, I go there and scan the list and read the articles that I'm interested in, increasingly very few.
I don't know how to implement these things to improve the experience for the user, including myself. Someone with more experience in user interface design will surely have more to offer than this.
ps. The article is still not there.
Salut,
Jacques
RSS just isn't handy for news sites, but it becomes really handy for tracking for very good blogs that update seldom and/or irregularly.
...of Internet users, only 4% knowingly use ARP. However, 99.99% of Internet users do use it.
Seriously, WTF is with that "knowingly" in there, the majority of "Internet users" wouldn't know their ass from their elbow, let alone whar RSS is or what it stands for.
Already happened. "Another part of Microsoft's RSS plans seemed to draw the most criticism. Microsoft also released a specification for an extension to one format of syndication feeds, RSS 2.0, for handling ordered lists."
I set up a feed to the RSS from Slashdot when it was first available. The problem was that so many new articles get posted here, it was immediately a chore to scan all the titles for discussions of interest. I gave up in less than 24 hours, and reverted to scanning the customised home page for new articles and using the message system to check for replies to threads I was interested in. And that was just with one source; try hooking up to the BBC News feed for ten minutes and see if you can keep up! :-)
On the various bulletin board systems I follow, Slashdot being one, I find a good messaging system is invaluable: they tell me what I really want to know immediately but can't see straight off the home page, which is when someone replies to a comment I've made (ideally, with further options to pick up things like replies-to-replies in subthreads I've participated in, or other replies to comments I've replied to as well). They don't add further clutter I don't want. I doubt any simple "dump every new title to an RSS feed" approach will ever rival the power of a moderately good messaging system.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's amazing how much is plagiarized from AP, Reuters, etc...
It also amazes me how so many self-important bloggers can talk about "replacing the MSM" with a straight face. This goes especially for political bloggers on the left and right. A casual perusal of Technorati or memeorandum on any given day is enough to see how much blog content is editorializing on stories published in the MSM. What the hell do they think they'd have to talk about without the MSM?
That's not to say I haven't found blogs worth keeping tabs on, nor to suggest that I don't think there's anything valuable about the blogosphere. But we are a long way off from so-called "citizen journalists" being anywhere close to the league of professional journalism.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
RSS and sites like Google news, realistically make the concept of separate websites redundant. There's not really much point in slash code anymore, slashdot, fark, digg, etc etc might as well be just another blog and all blogs might as well just be one big RSS feed. All news sites might as well join in too and that goes for pretty much any site out there thats news based in any way. Pretty much everything else can go on Wikipedia and the rest can go on AmazonBay. we can make do with three websites for the entire world: one giant categorised RSS feed, one encyclopedia and one online auction and shop.
So why haven't we? (not that I want to).
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Do we have stats on how many users don't know what RSS is, but use it nevertheless? How many know RSS not by name or technical function, but by the idea of I want to do X, and if I click on button Y, I can do it?
It's probably not true in this case, but a technology only reaches it's maximum exposure when most people use it without knowing it. When it just becomes something to be taken for granted.
When I first started using RSS, I subscribed to yahoo, cnn (about 4 of their feeds), and abcnews news feeds. I was thinking, "I'll get multiple perspectives on major stories, and make comparisons". Ahh, the starry-eyed idealism of ignorance...
Then I learned the truth. The spin happens at journalist-time -- the talking heads (or the writers behind the talking heads, whatever) get their news from the same Associated Press feed, and spin it their own way. In internet-land, there's no talking head -- just the AP story (and inherently the bias of the original AP journalist).
If you're looking at AP news stories online, everyone is just reposting the same exact story verbatim anyway. And generally non-AP topics don't get covered by many different perspectives.