More than 500,000 Google Reader users flock to Feedly in two days
Google's controversial decision to shut down Google Reader on July 1st has left its users searching for a new news-collecting homeland, and we now have an idea of the scale of the RSS diaspora.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Reader had spent years consolidating the feed-reader market: Bloglines' 2008 collapse sent its founder toward Google Reader, while Google later added a flurry of feed-reader features and said in 2010 that Reader was doing well. Google's July 1 shutdown reverses that concentration point.
Feedly's reported half-million arrivals in two days turn the shutdown from a product-retirement dispute into an immediate distribution event for RSS readers. The same story's pickup across multiple technology outlets underscores how broadly the migration is being watched.
First-order effects
- Feedly gains more than 500,000 prospective active users in two days, rapidly expanding the audience it must retain as Google Reader closes.
- Google Reader users must select and move to a replacement before July 1, ending Google Reader's role as their feed-reading endpoint.
Second-order effects
- Other RSS-reader providers face a sharper contest for displaced Google Reader users, with Feedly's early influx giving it a visible adoption lead.
- Publishers that reached a concentrated Reader audience will see readership mediated through a wider set of reader applications as users redistribute.
Third-order effects
- If the migration persists, RSS consumption shifts from a Google-centered endpoint to competition among independent reader clients, making user experience and migration ease central sources of leverage.
- The episode shows how retiring a mature aggregation product can rapidly reallocate an audience to substitute services rather than eliminate the underlying use case.
The trend: Google Reader's closure is accelerating endpoint substitution in RSS, as users move their subscriptions and attention from a dominant aggregator to competing reader apps.