Swedish media have had RSS feeds for quite some time now and the adoption rate seems to be stable. The number of subscribers in Bloglines is growing at a steady rate and the most popular feeds now have more subscribers than the Swedish A-list bloggers do. RSS is apparently a form of consuming news from big media that appeals to a growing part of the population, although the numbers are still very small in comparison to newspapers’ normal circulation.
What amazes me is that Aftonbladet still doesn’t come with an RSS feed (or does it?) apart from a hacked feed created via MyRSS: http://myrss.com/f/a/f/aftonbladetSe32e8bf1.rss91. This little hack has 29 subscribers at Bloglines. Imagine how many subscribers an official feed would have, considering that Aftonbladet.se is the leading news web page in Sweden. Of course, one could argue that there is no economy in RSS (yet) or that the numbers are still insignificant. Sure, but why be the last to jump on the waggon? RSS will grow, I am sure of that.
It’s been a while since I checked last time, but Dagens Nyheter is still the most popular feed, in fact DN has 3 of the top 10 feeds which are (subscribers in Bloglines):
1. Dagens Nyheter (214)
2. Dagens Nyheter Senaste Nytt (198)
3. Ny Teknik (185)
4. Computer Sweden (161)
5. Internetworld (160)
6. SR Ekot (151)
7. IDG.se (124)
8. Expressen Nyheter (101)
9. Dagens Nyheter Ekonomi (88)
10. Expressen (66)
Footnote 1: I’m not counting the feeds from media blogs, only “regular news” feeds. I’m aware that Aftonbladet’s blogs have RSS feeds, but this is a non-blog post.
Footnote 2: I have seen estimates that Bloglines have somewhere between 20-35 per cent of the market. If that is true, multiply the numbers above accordingly and you get an estimate of the total number of subscribers.