Top 10 RSS Feeds at NewsIsFree.
“Well, time to do an exercise I haven’t done in a long time: web server logs inventory… 10 most downloaded RSS feeds from NewsIsFree:
- CNN
- Scientific American
- USA Today
- New Scientist
- Blue’s News
- BBC World
- Science Daily
- FARK
- NYT International News
- IDG Infoworld
Number 1 was downloaded nearly four hundred thousand times. Number 10, one hundred and fifty thousand times. Sometime this month though, that feed stop sending real content and is redirecting people to IDG’s own feed they started providing….
IE 6 is twice as popular as IE 5.5. Radio Userland is used as much as IE 5.5….
A bad number (not that the others were good): our front page only gets a quarter of the hits that the most popular RSS feed gets. And it’s the only non RSS page which appears in the top 30! This means their is no way the portal can in itself sustain the RSS feeds, whether by advertising or by subscription. And no matter what service we can come up with, people can get the feeds and replicate pretty much of it on their desktop. Which, in the light of recent developments in news aggregators and web services, is probably a good thing! So it looks like pretty much inevitable that the RSS feeds will have to go, and some other form on content delivery will have to be designed. I wonder what the less disruptive way of doing it would be…” [Too Much News]
Some interesting statistics from Mike Krus that highlight how popular aggregators are, although admittedly they’re not even close to a tipping point yet. Obviously, the big numbers are the good news. The number of Radio users versus IE 5.5 is also interesting, showing the impact it’s had at the intersection of blogging and news aggregation.
The bad news is, Mike has to figure out a way to make some money from NewsIsFree, which as he admits, is going to be difficult. I’m not sure what the revenue model is here yet, although I wish there was a way for Mike’s karma in the community to translate to some profits.
I hope this isn’t a case of Mike being ahead of his time. It’s too bad the BigPubs aren’t looking to him to help syndicate their content, since they have the most to gain from wider distribution right now. Today I realized that I have read more articles from the Chicago Sun-Times in the last two months than I had in the last ten years, all because Mike’s providing their feed to my aggregator. So thanks, Mike, from me and the Sun Times (even though they don’t know it yet).
[The Shifted Librarian]