RSS still a techie geeky thing ?

Last month I wrote "RSS Marketing - Is it just hype? or the next best channel?" wondering whether RSS can be a viable marketing medium or not. The brief answer is 'NOT YET'. Despite many advantages of RSS over Email for content delivery, the RSS subscribers are still quite low and only techies and geeks seems to have so far embraced RSS. Read the recent post "What is RSS and Why it is better and safer than Email for content delivery" explaining why RSS is much better and safer for content delivery. 

As per an article in Business 2.0 "The New York Times' digital makeover", RSS subscriptions only generated about 4% of total page views. This number is quite in line with similar comparisons from other sources, confirming that RSS is yet to take off in the main stream.

And even RSS newsfeeds, which the Times adopted early, are still "a niche," Nisenholtz says. (In June, RSS feeds generated 12.2 million pageviews for the site out of a U.S. total of nearly 295 million.) "RSS is still very techie," he says. "Most people outside the business are totally unaware of it." [Article]

And another striking issue with RSS feeds is that only 18% of bloggers offer an RSS feed of their blog’s content (Bloggers - The Internet’s New Story Tellers). So far there are no clues on why RSS subscriptions are so low and factors affecting the faster adoption of RSS.