RSS usage survey

Microsoft have released a survey of 1354 users on their RSS consumption habits. Although not a massive number of subjects we can still glean some interesting results.

The results are based on Chinese users so the results will be biased towards asian users. We can see this reflected in the top 3 RSS readers as Zhuaxia is the second most popular reader, Bloglines being the most popular and the more recent Google reader coming in third.

Lots of feeds

It seems that people like to read lots of feeds with a third of users with over 100 feeds and over a third of users checking their RSS reader 5 or more times a day. I would presume most of the respondents of the survey have a tech related background and are using RSS to keep up to date and for research purposes.

A significant proportion of users appear to check their feeds at the start of the day, lunchtime and in the evening for about half an hour at a time. These users also have there own blogs and share information they find via their blog and also via social bookmarking sites.

RSS for sharing

It looks like publishing RSS feeds are a good idea if you have a techie audience as they tend to share their RSS discoveries with others. This is probably not that surprising as RSS is a great tool for disseminating information and also harvesting information for your own research.