Yahoo! recently published a whitepaper titled RSS—Crossing into the Mainstream (pdf) that summarizes a Ipsos-Insight poll that they recently commissioned. Some of the interesting findings include that awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users with only 12% of users being aware of RSS, and only 4% have knowingly used RSS. This is surprising to me and disappointing— people who aren’t tech savvy are the ones who will most benefit from RSS.
Also very interesting was the finding that 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. If you’re developing any product that uses or creates RSS, this paper is certainly worth a read.
