

How Large Will the Paid Feed Reader Market Be? - julien
http://www.rumproarious.com/2013/04/18/how-large-will-the-payed-feed-reader-market-be/

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hpaavola
Sorry for stealing this topic a bit, but could someone suggest a RSS reader
which works decently on mobile browsers?

Google Reader on mobile is really good; a heading, site name and first line
from the article. I've tried NewsBlur, but it wants you to use an app, and The
Old Reader, but it lists all your feeds first and the aggregated list takes
way too much space.

EDIT: I'd rather avoid free ones, unless I can host it myself. Don't want to
look for a new reader again next year.

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TylerE
Why are you so opposed to an app? This seems like the absolute IDEAL use case
for an app - the only thing going over the wire is the content, not
formatting, a bunch of JS, etc.

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pbreit
IMO, an app makes no sense at all. Sending just the data over the wire is not
limited to apps. And as has been pointed out, you frequently end up going to a
web page so why not start out in the browser (app-encapsulated browsers
usually stink).

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asb
I suspect a decent percentage of those 25 million CNN RSS subscribers actually
don't use RSS. They opened google reader one day, added CNN, and later forgot
about it.

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ambirex
This is pretty fun thought experiment.

Let's actually say CNN has close to 100% market penetration, making the number
of users around 25 million.

if say 5% of those would be willing to upgrade to a premium for $25/year that
would make the potential size of the market $31 million a year. Just using
numbers I'm pulling out of my posterior.

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PaulHoule
It's hard to say. Note that such a system might read messages from other
protocols (email, SMS, newsgroups, facebook, twitter, whatever) and it might
come across as so cool and essential that people really feel they need it.

What I can tell you is that Bing and Google have serious legal, business and
technical reasons why they can't offer services that have an interesting
degree of personalization based on your usage patterns. (Yes, they localize
and they do some simple adjustments of your search results to fool you into
thinking they're smarter than they really are)

(And funny, Duck Duck Go gets a huge amount of press for offering an
innovation-free zero-personalization search engine while the companies trying
to beat the 70% P@1 barrier Google and Bing face are stealth mode companies
you've never heard of.)

Anyhow, text analysis has been getting radically better in the last few years
and we're really on the threshold of building something that can automatically
construct an interest model for you and customize things based on preferences.
The algorithms are computationally expensive so if you've got a ARPU as bad as
Facebook you can't afford them, but you might be able to make a subscription
service profitable before somebody can make an advertising-based service.

Ultimately the RSS reader market has to give up on the "view hundreds of feeds
side by side" model and give up all the excuses that it can't be done.

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gz5
Not sure CNN is good proxy for RSS - many folks not using RSS for CNN because
they get CNN via Twitter etc or visit it x times/day anyways?

Seems like much (half?) of RSS market is folks monitoring streams of websites
that they don't visit regularly or monitor w/ non-RSS solutions?

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voidfiles
Out of all the feeds that I checked CNN had the largest number of Google
Reader subscribers. If you are right, I would argue that CNN market
penetration is lower then 50% and thus the feed reader market would be bigger.

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gz5
Good point, I would guess it is lower than 50% of total (irrespective of
active vs. not active).

Not sure where you sourced your GR data but maybe the ratios of GR/uniques
across a few different types of sites to find out if GR ratios varies by site
type could sharpen the straw man.

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voidfiles
Agreed.

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speek
For those of you who need your RSS fix: I made a little thing yesterday that
sends you an email (I have it running daily via cronjob) with whatever
news/information is relevant to you -> <https://github.com/mheld/daily-digest>

It's not pretty, but it sure as hell works for me
([https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63726/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63726/Screen%20Shot%202013-04-18%20at%207.23.54%20AM.png))

Please feel free to fork it!

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Kylekramer
Ludicrously optimistic. Not even questioning that CNN's Google Reader stats is
all active users just throws the entire calculation out of whack.

I'd be shocked if the RSS market is larger than 15 million.

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davidjohnstone
I really should make some time and do the final 5% (and get it online) on a
feed reader I spent a couple of weeks building a few weeks ago…

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bdarnell
The stats cited here include both Reader and iGoogle, so you can't really
extrapolate from these numbers. CNN was disproportionately popular with
iGoogle users (where it is a part of the default configuration for new US
users) while Engadget was disproportionately popular with Reader users (where
it is/was one of the featured suggestions for new users)

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jostmey
Google did not seem to think they could make money from it.

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jarek
Google did not seem to think they could make enough money from it to make it
worthwhile to them∗

