So How Big is RSS Usage online?

RSS is now taking off both in the online world and in the mobile space. Here are some numbers from different online studies.

According to Pew Internet 5% (6 million) of Americans online consume news and information through RSS or XML aggregators.

A study by Yahoo late last year revealed that 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.
According to Jupiter Research consumers are adopting Really Simple Syndication (RSS) at an astounding rate. Their recent report states that some 30 percent of businesses surveyed added content syndication in feeds due to customer demand. 25 percent publish feeds to increase their subscriber base and 10 percent cited "competitive pressure."

According to Adage RSS is currently used or is planned to be used within the next 12 months by 63% of consumer product marketers, 65% media and communications marketers, 37% retail marketers, 37% financial services marketers and 38% equipment and tech marketers. These are especially industries where RSS is needed by consumers to keep up with their latest relevant content

Yes, RSS penetration certainly is a problem right now, but RSS usage is growing. Forrester claims that 6% of the Internet population was using RSS in 2005. If we go back to their report from 2004, this is a 300% increase over 2004 usage (2%). This 6% of Internet users represents many of the most active people on the Internet, visiting the most sites and sifting through the most content

Many predict 2007 will be the year of major RSS subscriber growth. FeedBurner is growing faster than MySpace and Digg, according to Nielsen/NetRatings mainly because of live feed bookmarks in browsers and rising popularity of personal homepages, like Google IG, My Yahoo. From an advertising perspective, though the RSS population is still small it is one segment you cant afford to ignore.

/ Joakim, Mobispine