One of the most exciting news RSS-wise this month , among other things, is NewsGator products can now be obtained for free. Tris at MapleLeaf 2.0 adequately and passionately covered the news on NewsGator consumer products in his post: NewsGator consumer products now all free–now you have no excuse not to use them. Web Worker Daily came up with an interesting article about the latest developments with Newsgator. The post: Newsgator: It’s the Attention, Stupid. And points out to obvious and not so obvious reasons behind the move:

Bloggers everywhere woke up to a nice surprise. Their feed statistics jumped overnight! How did this happen? Google is finally reporting FeedBurner statistics. Finally? Yes – they didn’t used to report numbers to Feedburner so the statistics were skewed on the downside. Bloggers could only guess what the number might be and no one had a way to compare the popularity of feed readers.
It seems that Google Reader is far out pacing Bloglines as the reader of choice. Here are some numbers from b5media as reported by Jeremy Wright, CEO:

For those who are wondering what that shift looks like, here …read more

ITNews Australia reports that RSS for checking blogs still hasn’t caught on.
HitWise researcher LeeAnn Prescott said a comparison of traffic to online newsreaders and the Web’s most popular blogs indicates that only early adopters are using the newsreaders.

The typical US Internet user has yet to adopt Web-based newsreaders for checking blogs, a Web metrics firm said Friday.
While acknowledging that her findings are not conclusive, HitWise researcher LeeAnn Prescott said a comparison of traffic to online newsreaders and the Web’s most popular blogs indicates that only early adopters – primarily businesspeople and the technology savvy ” are using the newsreaders.
This part …read more

Nielsen//NetRatings announced yesterday that broadband users are 3x more likely to use RSS over narrow-band users. The “Research” indicated that broadband users are more likely to make better use of Internet functionalities and newer technologies, such as RSS feeds and blogging. Not very shocking conclusions you might think, but just like Bill Flitter writes, it is surprising that they name the term “RSS” in the headline of the press release. Can this be an indication of RSS going mainstream? Just like predicted?

Simone Carletti from the RSS world in Italy has created a script to get your FeedBurner stats in any RSS reader! It uses the FeedBurner Awareness API. His quickstart is here and an example is here (via lineofsite). Now why didn’t Feedburner think of that?

Pheedo has released their “Pheed Read #3” report, the complete report can be downloaded here (PDF). The most important findings include:

Consumers Remaining Within Aggregator / News Reader Environment To View RSS Content
Full-Text Feeds and Summary Feeds Garner Similar Click-Through Rates
Summary Feed CTR Varies Widely
Most Publishers Opt for Summary Feeds
Bloglines and MyYahoo! Lead RSS Content Aggregators
Standalone Ads Continue to Outperform Inline Ads
Content Category Influences RSS Ad Performance; Niche Categories Yielding High Response Rates

And the Executive Summary:
As the RSS publishing and advertising marketplace evolves, it is important to monitor the indicators such as click-through rates, which are normalizing; RSS ad performance, which …read more

Track your referrers with ReefeRSS! It’s a new analytic tool for your site and you can track your referers via RSS, now that I think about it I really like the idea. If you own a site or blog you always wanna know where your visitors come from. The more info the better! Now you can be kept up-to-date via a simple feed. The service is free and you don’t even have to create an account! It’s referer madness! Oh, and here’s a feed for the latest referers across all sites (via kbcafe.com).

AdAge Interactive Fact Pack (PDF via micropersuasion): 78% of RSS feed users are male!

One of the things I love about RSS is that it’s simple, clean and quick. I dont really care if there’s advertising in a feed (or on a site), as long as it’s relevant and the content is good! Size and relevancy are very important, so don’t create ads that oversize the content…
A few weeks ago I read a post about FeedSky (Chinese Feedburner), this company enables users to add advertising of Joyo in their feeds, and get revenue sharing when ads are clicked by readers. It is the first attempt in China to monetize RSS feeds.
You also wanna monetize …read more

The JaK Attack! published it’s tenth podcast yesterday and it features an interview with Eric Olson (yup, the VentureWeek podcaster when he’s not busy burning feeds) and Traci Hailpern from Feedburner. They talk about stats, forwarding, browser friendly feeds, FeedFlare (API’s), BuzzBoost and other cool stuff. Check it out if ya like feeds;)