MarketingSherpa has a fascinating article about RSS usage in the UK and America.  According to the article there are 75 million people who use it, but 50 million of them don’t know they’re using it.  How can this be?  According to the article most of the 50 million are people who use MyYahoo or MyMSN and think of the RSS as news headlines or some such thing.

This has huge implications for bloggers, especially business bloggers.  The largest group of RSS consumers are not tech geeks and they don’t know what RSS means and they don’t care, BUT they do value the service.  In the immediate future I’d say it would be really smart to set up an "Add to MyYahoo" link to your site in addition to your generic "RSS Feed" link.

I recommend you read the article fast because MarketingSherpa puts their articles behind a "subscription" wall after a while.

Other valuable links provided at the end of the article:

RSS study charts and data from Neilsen//NetRatings & Yahoo!/Ipsos Reid
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/rsscharts/study.html

How to get your RSS feed included at MyYahoo:
http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss guide/

E-site Marketing – the company Travelocity uses to power their RSS offering:
http://www.esitemarketing.com

Info about the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed RSS Feed
http://www.scripting.com/2006/02/14.html#When:9:35:50PM

MarketingSherpa’s more info about RSS page
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3179