Last week, I presented my readers with a simple survey to determine which RSS readers are most used by my readers. The results indicate some very surprising numbers. I compiled an XLS with the results, feel free to download it and points out mistakes.
https://rssweblog.com/best.rss.readers.xls
I was actually interested in three numbers. What percentage of people have used each RSS aggregator and say it's their favorite RSS reader, have it installed and have it bookmarked. Of course, native RSS readers are installed and not bookmarked and Web-based RSS readers may be bookmarked but not installed. Let's start with the percentage that say it's their favorite RSS reader, minimum 10 users.
| Reader | % Favorite |
| GreatNews | 86% |
| Bloglines | 39% |
| Attensa for Outlook | 33% |
| NetNewswire | 33% |
| News Alloy | 17% |
| Google Reader | 17% |
| FeedDemon | 15% |
| Pluck IE Edition | 13% |
| Onfolio | 9% |
| Rojo | 8% |
| IE 7.0 | 6% |
| SharpReader | 5% |
| My Yahoo! | 4% |
| NewsGator Online | 3% |
| Pluck Firefox Edition | 3% |
| Firefox Live Bookmarks | 2% |
| Google Desktop | 2% |
| RSS Bandit | 0% |
| Pluck Web Edition | 0% |
Hello GreatNews. GreatNews is also my favorite native RSS reader and I can understand your voting. GreatNews pretty much dominates this rating. Bloglines, Attensa and NetNewswire form a second tier of RSS readers in this category.
Now let's move on. Let's examine the percentage of RSS readers that are installed versus used.
| Reader | % Installed |
| GreatNews | 96% |
| Firefox Live Bookmarks | 71% |
| IE 7.0 | 68% |
| NetNewswire | 58% |
| Google Desktop | 45% |
| Attensa for Outlook | 33% |
| Onfolio | 26% |
| FeedDemon | 26% |
| RSS Bandit | 25% |
| SharpReader | 23% |
| Bloglines | 22% |
| Pluck Firefox Edition | 20% |
| Pluck IE Edition | 19% |
Again GreatNews dominates, followed by the two browsers, Firefox and IE, which are there most because the users are using them for reasons other than RSS reading. The same can be said of Google Desktop which places 5th. The two other RSS reader which do place well are again NetNewswire and and Attensa.
Last let's move to the used RSS reader which are most often bookmarked.
| Reader | % Bookmarked |
| Bloglines | 73% |
| News Alloy | 58% |
| Google Reader | 50% |
| My Yahoo! | 42% |
| Rojo | 41% |
| News Gator Online | 31% |
| Onfolio | 17% |
| Pluck Web Edition | 12% |
Bloglines is far and away the favorite RSS reader bookmarked. Surprisingly New Alloy places second, a rather less known RSS reader followed by Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Rojo and NewsGator.
From this survey, it's pretty easy to determine which RSS readers are liked more often than not; GreatNews, NetNewswire, Attensa, Bloglines, News Alloy and Google Reader. Which RSS readers are generally uninstalled, because they are not liked; Pluck and RSS Bandit. Which RSS readers are used for reasons other than reading RSS; Firefox, IE and Google Desktop.
Although GreatNews basically dominates almost every score in this survey, it gets no where near the same attention as other top RSS readers.
I've always wondered why this is. The only explanation is that the folk of GreatNews don't have the right connections into the blogosphere a-list. How many times has Michael Arrington blogged about GreatNews? Never! How about Bloglines? Constantly. NewsGator? Constantly. Pluck? Constantly?
Anyone wanna bet that none of the a-listers pick up this thought?
