The Yahoo! RSS White Paper

Yahoo has published a report on RSS that has some interesting numbers in it. I would try to post them here, but Steve Rubel has already done a great job so I will just quote him.

• Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of
RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.

• 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start
pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling
technology.

• 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe
to podcasts.

• Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users� prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly,
browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).

• My Yahoo! has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product.

I know when I spoke at a PR conference back in August, I got some really strange looks from the audience when I started to mention RSS. For mainstream adaptation to occur, I agree with Steve and others that RSS needs to become a seamless experience.

I think we are heading in the right direction with browsers such as Firefox and Safari introducing RSS, as well as the upcoming IE7.