How Large Will the Paid Feed Reader Market Be?

Sorry for stealing this topic a bit, but could someone suggest a RSS reader which works decently on mobile browsers?

Google Reader on mobile is really good; a heading, site name and first line from the article. I've tried NewsBlur, but it wants you to use an app, and The Old Reader, but it lists all your feeds first and the aggregated list takes way too much space.

EDIT: I'd rather avoid free ones, unless I can host it myself. Don't want to look for a new reader again next year.

I suspect a decent percentage of those 25 million CNN RSS subscribers actually don't use RSS. They opened google reader one day, added CNN, and later forgot about it.

This is pretty fun thought experiment.

Let's actually say CNN has close to 100% market penetration, making the number of users around 25 million.

if say 5% of those would be willing to upgrade to a premium for $25/year that would make the potential size of the market $31 million a year. Just using numbers I'm pulling out of my posterior.

It's hard to say. Note that such a system might read messages from other protocols (email, SMS, newsgroups, facebook, twitter, whatever) and it might come across as so cool and essential that people really feel they need it.

What I can tell you is that Bing and Google have serious legal, business and technical reasons why they can't offer services that have an interesting degree of personalization based on your usage patterns. (Yes, they localize and they do some simple adjustments of your search results to fool you into thinking they're smarter than they really are)

(And funny, Duck Duck Go gets a huge amount of press for offering an innovation-free zero-personalization search engine while the companies trying to beat the 70% P@1 barrier Google and Bing face are stealth mode companies you've never heard of.)

Anyhow, text analysis has been getting radically better in the last few years and we're really on the threshold of building something that can automatically construct an interest model for you and customize things based on preferences. The algorithms are computationally expensive so if you've got a ARPU as bad as Facebook you can't afford them, but you might be able to make a subscription service profitable before somebody can make an advertising-based service.

Ultimately the RSS reader market has to give up on the "view hundreds of feeds side by side" model and give up all the excuses that it can't be done.

Not sure CNN is good proxy for RSS - many folks not using RSS for CNN because they get CNN via Twitter etc or visit it x times/day anyways?

Seems like much (half?) of RSS market is folks monitoring streams of websites that they don't visit regularly or monitor w/ non-RSS solutions?

For those of you who need your RSS fix: I made a little thing yesterday that sends you an email (I have it running daily via cronjob) with whatever news/information is relevant to you -> https://github.com/mheld/daily-digest

It's not pretty, but it sure as hell works for me (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63726/Screen%20Shot%2020...)

Please feel free to fork it!

Ludicrously optimistic. Not even questioning that CNN's Google Reader stats is all active users just throws the entire calculation out of whack.

I'd be shocked if the RSS market is larger than 15 million.

I really should make some time and do the final 5% (and get it online) on a feed reader I spent a couple of weeks building a few weeks ago…

The stats cited here include both Reader and iGoogle, so you can't really extrapolate from these numbers. CNN was disproportionately popular with iGoogle users (where it is a part of the default configuration for new US users) while Engadget was disproportionately popular with Reader users (where it is/was one of the featured suggestions for new users)

Google did not seem to think they could make money from it.