[jcharnley]

Do you guys know of any good research into who use RSS feeds? My idea is that only people involving with webdeveloping and bloggers use RSS.

But what about your average end user??

Is it even worth having a RSS feed on your site? (speaking of all kinds of sites, commercial, charity organizations, and etc)

/charnley

[iblastoff]

what do you mean by who uses it? who implements it on their sites or who actually bothers to subscribe to feeds and such?

either way, why the hell wouldn't it be worth it?? its not like its even hard to implement. if you have sections on your site that are updated somewhat regularly then of course its worth it.

your 'idea' that only people involved with web developing and bloggers use RSS is rather silly and naive.

[jcharnley]

Well thats rather big of you to say that,... hmm .. silly? naive? First of all it wasn't a idea, more a question. 2nd, what research do you backup your statement with? or do you use your personal experience?

It would be worth it, if clients website users use RSS, but if nobody uses it, for example use RSS from red cross (just an example), would it be worth it? Not that its a pain to have write/update it, but merly the idea of, "would any of the target-group be using it"

Btw, i think 90% of denmark has not heard of RSS, not even the web developers. so it would be very interesting to see research regarding the uses of RSS feeds, categories into age, sex, culture group, country, etc etc...

My main question was, do you know of any research regarding the usage of RSS Feeds...

[haku]

By not adding it to your site, you could be cutting off users who would use it. By adding it to your site, maybe no one will use it, but its there if someone wants to. So adding it can't hurt.

As for being a pain to update - just write a script that automatically updates it.

Here are some sites that I found on google. Haven't looked through them, but they seem to fit the bill of what you are looking for:

RSS Statistics
RSS Statistics

[Scramble!]

Take a look at publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf (Yahoo! Publisher Network's RSS Statistics, PDF).

A lot of good reading. Exactly how precise it is might be up for discussion, but it sure is a good start.

Key findings
- Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
- 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.