Google Reader Falls, Paid RSS Services Emerge

It has been a month since Google Reader exited the stage, but how are today's RSS readers performing? Have they evolved? A recent article from foreign media claims that the paid RSS tool market is flourishing, with several companies placing great significance on these products. The RSS readers emerging in the post-Google Reader era appear to be more like evolutionary versions rather than mere substitutes.

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It has been a month since Google Reader officially shut down, leaving its devoted users heartbroken and ending its nearly eight-year dominance in the RSS world. When the news of its closure was announced, third-party services like Digg and Feedly quickly sprang into action, aiming to replace it.

At that time, they were like a rescue team, bravely stepping forward to allow us to continue reading in ways other than traditional web browsing. One month after Google Reader’s farewell, those RSS reader alternatives have become regular products, striving hard to meet various user needs. So, how exactly have they performed since Google Reader left?

Daunting Task

It turns out that creating an RSS reader is no easy feat. Feedly only completed its migration to its own servers a few weeks before Google Reader closed, while Digg launched just days before Google Reader's official shutdown. Newsblur, which began operations in 2009, faced a sharp rise in traffic after Google announced the closure of Google Reader. Its founder, Samuel Clay, admitted that for months they had to work 14 hours a day to ensure their site loaded within 100 milliseconds.

The worst-performing alternative would have to be Old Reader. The pressure of getting the site up and running left its employees in dire straits. They had initially announced that the service would close on Monday this week, but then brought it back online later in the week. The employees described their lives as "the most torturous existence we can imagine." Clearly, competing with a few medium-sized rivals doesn't feel much easier than going up against a giant.

Those lively services still face daunting tasks: first, not relying on Google's servers and data, and second, replicating all its features. Currently, no mainstream product offers a truly effective search function, and those that do, like Feedly and Digg, reserve it exclusively for premium members (i.e., paying users).

This feature was a piece of cake for Google, merely applying its superior advanced search engine technology. However, for small companies, adding such a feature comes at a very high cost. Even simple functions like OPML import have only been added recently, and syncing mobile apps and devices will probably take even longer. Due to the rush to launch their readers before Google Reader's closure, many companies still have half-finished features.

Of course, those companies that made it through have reaped impressive rewards. After Google Reader's closure, some users may have abandoned RSS readers altogether, but most seem to have switched to other platforms. In the weeks following Google's announcement, Feedly gained 3 million users fleeing from Google Reader, while Newsblur claimed that its number of paying users is now 25 times what it was in March.

Significant Importance

For Google, Google Reader was essentially an ancillary product, just a channel to drive traffic to its social network Google+, not worth the resources to keep it alive. For Newsblur, however, RSS means everything—it's the sole purpose and product of the company—so charging for it became necessary. "All our competitors either already offer paid services or are planning them," said Clay of Newsblur. "The potential for growth in user numbers is gone, so the only way to survive is by charging users."

For Digg, RSS means even more. Its reader fits into the larger strategy of Digg.com and Betaworks' entry into the content business. Digg General Manager Jake Levine describes Digg Reader as "a key piece of the puzzle for the future of our company." Scraping the internet isn’t easy, but it gives you insights into exactly what people are reading. Levine envisions the reader as "the foundation for a personalized suite of news products suitable for all types of readers." If you want to present interesting content, a dedicated content scraper lets you know what users are reading and clicking on, making these extremely valuable data points.

Evolutions

From this perspective, the RSS readers emerging in the post-Google Reader era seem more like evolutions than replacements. Although Google Reader was excellent, Google let it stagnate. It could only be a marginal project, one that added to the burden of engineers as the company sought to strengthen its dominance in search and attempted to enter the social realm. If it weren't for Google's corporate strategy needs, RSS could have developed even further.

It was already an important open web standard, and now it could become a paid professional tool, akin to Photoshop or AOL-style portals, offering users broad internet experiences. It could also become something we haven't yet imagined. The involved companies are still working hard, striving to bring Google Reader-level feature sets, but there's no reason to think they'll stop there. Perhaps it's time to stop mourning the old RSS readers and start looking forward to the readers of the future.