eMarketer quotes research from Perseus Development Corp that there are 5 million blogs out there now in 2003, with that number doubling to 10m next year. This should fuel the growth of RSS and newsreaders, and raises the question: will banner ads remain viable in a syndicated world? What is the new model for advertising when just the content of the page is sent to a news feed aggregator?
Well, there are already well over 7 million people using blogs in just the top 4 hosted sites (I see it hitting 20 million next year), and I just don’t see anyone in the mass market using RSS readers.
The big hosted solutions, where most people will get their blogging service from, tend to operate independantly, since they grow by inviting your friends onto the same service. I can see some interoperability between them, but I can’t see the mass market using a standalone RSS reader. If it doesn’t come via email or work in a browser, most people tend not to use it…
hm…if (when) microsoft provides a free RSS aggregator as an outlook plugin, I expect this to change.