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  • Ken McCarthy organized and sponsored the first conference ever held on the subject of the commercial potential of the World Wide Web. His company Amacord Inc., formerly E-Media, was one of the first Internet-based businesses in the world.

    In addition to working with small and mid-sized business clients since 1993, McCarthy was a consultant to NEC's Biglobe, the largest online service in Japan, from 1996 to 2001. His book The Internet Business Manual was the first book on web entrepreneurship published in that country. He is also credited by Hotwired magazine with being one of the people responsible for the development and popularization of the banner ad, one of the key underpinnings of commercial Internet publishing.

    A graduate of Princeton University, McCarthy came to the Internet industry with a varied background which included technical consulting for two of New York's top investment banks, lecturing on educational psychology at MIT, Columbia, and NYU, and founding and operating a number of small businesses, including one that helped produce an Academy Award winning documentary.

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April 13, 2006

RSS reality check

I know RSS is a good idea and it very well may be the wave of the future. In fact, you may be reading this via RSS.

That being said, here's the math from Europe according to Rebecca Jennings of Forrester, a normally reliable tech research firm...

Percent of European Internet users who subscribe to RSS feeds:  1%

Of course, this estimate may be off and in other markets, like North America, the percentage may be much higher, but it "feels" right.

Yes, among the technically adept folks I encounter which includes tech journalists and bloggers, the percentage is much, much higher. And these folks are influential well out of proportion to their small numbers, but the reality is that, currently at least, a very small number of your prospects and customers are RSS readers.

So if you're sweating RSS, there's still a lot of time on this slow moving and much-hyped technology.  If your resources are limited - and aren't they always - this may be one technology you can put on the back burner.

April 13, 2006 in Internet insight |

Comments

Ken McCarthy

Antony VanCouvering, CEO of Names at Work and a very savvy Internet marketing veteran, has written a helpful overview of blogs and RSS:

http://www.namesatwork.com/blogs/

Posted by: Ken McCarthy | April 21, 2006 at 06:02 PM

Travis Miller

Ken,

An interesting discussion point here...

Perhaps RSS usage is low when compared to the general population, but what are the numbers when measured only against those people who actually read blogs.

I believe you would find that a large % of those people reading blogs use RSS.

I think, by definition, if blogging is important, RSS is important.

Posted by: Travis Miller | April 28, 2006 at 03:38 PM

Ken McCarthy

Travis,

Good point.

And folks who take the trouble to subscribe to RSS feeds may be significantly more influential than those who don't.

Another good article on RSS that gets into the details that too many articles seem happy to gloss over:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

Posted by: Ken McCarthy | April 29, 2006 at 04:52 PM

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