RSS users are 78% male, 48% Internet users, but 83% are not aware they are using RSS

Nielsen//NetRatings reports that RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users. Not only do RSS users visit more news Web sites than non-users, they also visit those sites more frequently. RSS users visited the top 20 news Web sites nearly three times as often as non-users and all other news Web sites four times as often. This means that sites outside of the top 20 properties may be among the greatest beneficiaries of RSS.

83% of survey respondents who were identified by clickstream data as RSS users were unaware that they were using RSS technology. This can be explained by sites such as My Yahoo!, where users can customize content without knowing anything about the RSS feeds that make that customizing possible. Among RSS users who understood the technology, 78% were male, and 48% were longtime Internet users who have been going online since at least 1994. Among unaware RSS users, 54% were male and 36% were longtime Internet users. These figures were lowest among respondents who did not use RSS feeds, with just 46% male and 34% longtime Internet users.