Hitwise is reporting that Google Reader is still lagging pretty far behind both Bloglines and Rojo in terms of market share, despite much love from tech writers throughout the blogosphere.
So why isn’t Google’s product more popular among the RSS feed reader choices?
I use Google Reader every day in my story research. I’ve have somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 RSS subscriptions, and thus far I haven’t experienced any difficulties in reading, sorting, or starring any of the blog topics that roll in.
The interface is clean as well, something I greatly appreciate. The ability to scroll down a gargantuan list of topics in list view has been a Godsend, because I just don’t have the time to read every blog post that comes across my screen.
Mostly though, I love that it’s all done in AJAX. I don’t have to keep constantly refreshing the page in order to check new feeds, all I need to do is hit the ‘r’ key and check out what juicy new content is available for consumption.
But still, Google Reader isn’t even close in terms of raw numbers to any of the other RSS readers in terms of usage. The service has receive almost unanimous praise from some pretty influential bloggers, so what is keeping the usage statistics down?
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch presents one theory:
Feedburner doesn’t track it yet, so we can’t compare the subscriber numbers to other readers. We’ve noticed a significant jump in referrals from Google Reader, though. Enough to suggest that it is as large or larger than Bloglines already.
One semi-obvious explanation is that Google Reader requires far fewer page refreshes than Bloglines. This would decrease their page view numbers, but not visits, which is what Hitwise tracks. We may need to wait until Feedburner starts tracking Google Reader directly as well to triangulate its true popularity.
The lack of Feedburner tracking could represent a huge gap in reported usage of Google Reader. Once Feedburner starts keeping statistics for Google Reader, I will be very interested to see if the usage statistics show significant change, which I believe will be the case.
There may be an additional reason, however, why Google Reader hasn’t enjoyed a significant amount of market share.
Quite honestly, Google hasn’t done very much to advertise the service. I would venture that there is a significant amount of users who visit Google’s page every day who know absolutely nothing about Google Reader at all.
This week, Google used its homepage to market its Checkout services to visitors. Hitwise immediately noted a spike in traffic to the Google Checkout site, directly attributed to the strategically placed advertisement.
In his blog post, Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer notes that this isn’t the first time Google has used such a tactic:
As we’ve seen in previous posts here and here, the prominent placement of a Google Service on the home page usually results in a surge of visits to that service.
So, don’t be surprised to see a pitch for Google Reader gracing the search engine’s homepage in the relatively near future.
As Feedburner begins to track usage statistics for the service, and as Google moves to market the service with more intentionality, I predict that 2007 will be the year in which Google Reader explodes throughout the Web 2.0 landscape.
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Joe is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
