The great RSS land grab

According to Feedburner in a recent interview some interesting RSS metrics came to light. Based on a large sample of 60,000 publishers there shows a weekly growth of subscribers to feeds of 5 percent. This rate of growth is quite impressive for such a relatively new media.

The interview also goes on to reveal that there are RSS feeds in existence that have half a million subscribers, that's right half a million. They also claim to manage several feeds in excess of 100,000 subscribers. These are quite amazing numbers considering that RSS is still a very new niche media.

There could be several reasons for such growth. Firstly I would speculate that there is currently an RSS land grab going on. Like the web 5 years ago when it started to take off there was a rush to stake your claim on the web. I believe this is a good time to start your feed before RSS reaches saturation. I mean people will only subscribe to so many feeds.

RSS is still a techie media and so most subscribers are relatively glued up on all things internet. Once RSS becomes mainstream then the general web population will start to take to RSS, this will I believe be the main growth of RSS.

Already you can start to see saturation in the webmaster targeted news feeds, this was the same at the beginning of the web. Just take a look at how many webmaster related sites there are now. If you visit some of the RSS directories you can see how many feeds are available.

You can listen to the Feedburner interview and find out for yourself about the rapid growth of RSS.