Most Japanese Don’t “Feed” Themselves

This is quite an interesting result of a recent survey. As I reported previously, Japanese blogs rule the world, but it seems that most people either do not use or don’t know how to use web feeds. Let’s look at the results in detail, but before we do, please tell me what is your experience?

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great technology that everyone should utilize because it saves significant amount of time and lets you keep up to date with the exponential proliferation of information. Google Reader is one of the best feed aggregators.

Over the 4th and 5th of September 2008 309 members of the CLUB BBQ free email service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.3% of the sample were male, 12.9% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 32.4% in their forties, and 11.3% in their teens or aged fifty or older.

Research results

Q1: Do you use RSS? (Sample size=309)

	All	Male N=180	Female N=129
Yes (to SQs)	24.9%	27.8%	20.9%
No	48.2%	50.0%	45.7%
Don’t know what RSS is	26.9%	22.2%	33.3%

Q1SQ1: What tools do you use to read RSS? (Sample size=77, multiple answer)

Web browser	59.7%
Web service	42.9%
Email	14.3%
Stand-alone application	16.9%
Other	0.0%

Q1SQ2: About how many RSS feeds do you read? (Sample size=77)

One to four	35.1%
Five to nine	24.7%
Ten to nineteen	15.6%
Twenty to twenty-nine	9.1%
Thirty to forty-nine	3.9%
Fifty or more	11.7%

Q1SQ3: What kinds of RSS feeds do you read? (Sample size=77, multiple answer)

News, media	75.3%
Blog, personal site	67.5%
Hobbies	33.8%
Community (BBS, etc)	24.7%
Business information (press releases, etc)	16.9%
Sports	10.4%
Finance	9.1%
Other	2.6%

Overall, it might not be a such a bad thing though. According to the research conducted around 2005, only 2-12% of all online US households use RSS. (Source)

Source: RSS widely unknown, few power users (What Japan Thinks)