RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline
One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to. I for one still maintain a Google Reader account …
Context & Ripple Effects
The decline has been building for years: Pluck's consumer reader was already fading back in 2006, 2007 looked like RSS's high-water mark, and by May 2009 TechCrunchIT had run a piece titled 'Rest in Peace, RSS.' This ReadWriteWeb piece closes the year confirming that arc — usage of dedicated readers is falling even among the enthusiasts who still keep a Google Reader account.
What changed in late 2009 is where the displacement is coming from: the same week this ran, Google's new real-time search results got their first public stress test when news of actress Brittany Murphy's death broke, with the Michael Jackson story earlier in the year having exposed how slowly traditional search caught up. Pulling fresh news from a search box or a social stream is exactly the behavior that substitutes for opening a feed reader.
First-order effects
- Standalone reader vendors face shrinking engaged audiences and no obvious monetization path, while publishers see feed subscribers — historically their most loyal readers — drift toward search and social discovery.
- Google Reader remains the default account power users maintain, which concentrates what's left of the market on a single free product whose owner has no direct revenue stake in it.
Second-order effects
- News discovery spending and attention shifts toward real-time channels: Google just demonstrated real-time search on a breaking-news event, and social streams become the layer where niche topics get followed instead of subscribed-to feeds.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, open syndication via RSS gives way to closed, platform-controlled distribution — readers stop owning their subscriptions as files or feeds and start renting their news stream from whichever company runs the timeline or the search box.
The trend: News consumption is migrating from user-owned feed subscriptions toward real-time search and social platforms, hollowing out the independent RSS reader market from the edges inward.