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Google Reader announced its shutdown exactly a year ago
- andyjohnson0 13y agoAs a satisfied newsblur user, I'm hoping that there will be another peak in April when all the people who joined last year renew their yearly subscriptions. Otherwise this doesn't look sustainable to me.
- pgt 13y agoMy initial reaction upon seeing the chart was that NewsBlur would be shutting down because of dropping income, but the chart period is only up until the Google Reader announcement to shut down. NewsBlur seems to be doing well, and that's great!
- polarix 13y agoNo, that's till present. The announcement was a year ago, when revenue spiked.
- petercoolz 13y agoThis confused me, but I think it's because annual subscription revenue was recognized in the month of the payment.
- julian55 13y agoExactly. If people renew there should be another peak about now. I have been happy with Newsblur so I have just renewed my subscription.
- GvS 13y agoImmediately after reading this post I thought: "Damn, I use them for half a year and I'm really happy, I should support them" and went to website to upgrade to premium and... I couldn't find it! It was hidden as 4th option from top menu under small settings cogwheel on bottom. Instead of all those useless (for me) statistics on front page you should put a small note like "Like us? Go premium!" to remind us that making something great needs support.
- KJasper 13y agoThe entire frontpage should be A/B-tested with some conversion experts. There is a lot of room for improvement if you look at the CTA's, buttons, comparison between free and premium, etc.
- graeme 13y agoI agree. If I stumbled on the Newsblur landing page, I wouldn't have even recognized it as a replacement for Google Reader. For instance, my eyes end on "Training". I now get that the software can be trained, but at first you wonder if Newsblur offers training. I also expect the pricing is too low. RSS is no longer mass market, but the people who use it tend to use it professionally. I will pay a LOT for something business critical that works well. As an aside, anything that is a business expense can be 50% higher, assuming a 33% average tax rate. You must earn $150 to buy a $100 consumer good, but only $100 to buy a $100 business item.
- esseti 13y agohow much is worth the peak?
- rplnt 13y agoIf my calculations are correct (done by paint.net, so...) the income/expenses for that period are about 185/139. So the peak managed to cover all expenses and more.
- jamespo 13y agoOne thing I really miss since google reader shutdown is a cross-platform (including Windows & Linux) native reader with ability to sync. I used to use RSSOwl. If any of the premium RSS services could support this I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.
- rplnt 13y agoWhat do you expect from a native desktop app as opposed to web app? I think most of it could be done via extension(s) over existing web reader. Notifications, offline mode, what else is there?
- hengheng 13y agoResponsiveness. Newsblur takes about five seconds to respond sometimes, and can't buffer any feeds for offline use.
- thristian 13y agoI should mention I'm one of the happy NewsBlur users who jumped ship from Google Reader, and I'm definitely going to renew my subscription.
- cstuder 13y agoI wish them good luck, but I'm happy to have gone with Fever and hosting my reader on my own. I am more and more glad that self-hosting alternatives for applications I use exist. For me, the compromise between the technical challenge to install your own app vs. paying to have it installed shifts towards self-hosting almost every day.
- kybernetikos 13y agoowncloud has a pretty reasonable rss reader. Slightly slow and clunky, but does the trick and has an android reader too. I run it on a $5 per month VPS.
- girvo 13y agoI personally just integrated selfoss into ownCloud. Was nice and easy, its all PHP :)
- shrikant 13y agoNewsBlur is open source and you can set up a self-hosted version of it as well. See https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
- cstuder 13y agoOh, I did not know that. Nice to have that option too.
- egeozcan 13y agoIt's a bit of a hassle to set it up correctly though (I'm not complaining or anything. It just is, compared to other hosted options. I love the fact that it's open source)
- mikevm 13y agoIs it possible to use the iOS/Android NewsBlur apps with a custom set up server?
- TeeWEE 13y agoI'm very interested to see the absolute expenses and income. Since server hosting is very cheap these days, they are probably not making a lot of money? Or they are paying too much for hosting?
- vshabanov 13y agoRSS readers are quite resource intensive. They need to continuously update feeds (even when you're not using the site) and when you reading they need to remember each post you've read. It's write heavy load that most databases do not handle well. So you need to shard and use more servers even with comparatively small number of users.
- rootuid 13y agoI don't get it? what windfall is he speaking of and he never addressed why he will continue even though it's loss making.
- josephlord 13y agoWell if those were annual payments it might be profitable spread over the whole year (my visual integration skills can't quite tell) and there should be another massive spike just about to start as all those people renew their subscriptions.
- joshuacc 13y agoMy subscription to Newsblur just auto-renewed. :-)
- pixelmonkey 13y agoI had the same exact thought. It might be that this graph represents month-by-month net income, rather than something like Net MRR. Perhaps the spike represents a large number of sign-ups for annual plans (it seems like his standard plan is $24/year) in a short period, which means he should see the same spike next year upon renewal (minus his churned customers, of course). It might be that if he "pro-rated" the monthly payments for his annual accounts as $2/month payments for the future 12 months, he is net positive right now. It's hard for me to tell by eye from the graph, but it's probably close.
- Maakuth 13y agoI don't quite get what is he trying to communicate here. The graph shows that there was some profit during the last summer but since then the income has failed to pay for the expenses. The text reads partially like a post-mortem of a failed project, partially like that of a success. Is he happy or not? For the record, I'm a happy NewsBlur subscriber and will definitely renew my subscription.
- gnah 13y agoThey'll hit another spike when users from the google reader shutdown renew their yearly subscriptions.
- Maakuth 13y agoThat seems likely. It would make the message clearer if this was explicit in the text.
- kokey 13y agoI think a bit of buzz around renewal time is good. The best new signups come from referrals, and the best time for referrals is shortly after a customer has made the decision to pay for the service.
- fnl 13y agoThen I don't get it: According to what we can see, in March 2014 they already should be "hitting it" (1 year after the initial March 2013 spike), but it looks pretty bleak to me.
- VikingCoder 13y agoMaybe the two graph lines are on different scales? Otherwise, they're delusional.
- itcmcgrath 13y agoThe author of the graph should perhaps read up on Rev Rec[1], particularly the idea of deferred revenue. It seems that they are counting subscription revenue at the time it is paid, rather than recognizing over the length of the subscription picture. The later would give you a much better idea on how the business is operating. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_recognition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_recognition
- Kiro 13y ago> Why spend all that money on subcontractors and new tools? Because I’m investing in building an even better news reader. Do people want a "better" news reader? I feel this would be profitable if you stopped wasting so much money.
- mistermann 13y agoNot to mention, are there that many people that even write blogs anymore, or is there maybe another more modern use for news readers that I'm not aware of?
- werid 13y agoi subscribe to rss feeds from blogs, newspapers, tumblrs, instagram tags ... and considering adding youtube subscriptions as well.
- joshuacc 13y agoThere are thousands upon thousands of people who write blogs on wordpress.com, Blogger, and even older sites like LiveJournal and Xanga. Not to mention all the technically inclined folks who run their own with self-hosted WordPress, Jekyll, and friends. The number of blog producers doesn't even need to be that large (relatively speaking) in order for a newsreader to be beneficial to blog consumers. Say that there were 10,000 blogs in the world. If you were interested in more than ten or so, it would be a hassle to visit each one on a regular basis to check for updates. And yes, RSS is used beyond just blogs. Mainstream news sites often publish RSS feeds of their categories. News aggregator sites like HN tend to have RSS feeds as well.
- untog 13y agoare there that many people that even write blogs anymore ...yes?
- icebraining 13y agoUhm, about half the links on HN are from blogs, and many of the others have RSS feeds as well (e.g. news sites). Personally, I follow blogs, podcasts, news sites, Twitter accounts, Tumblrs, Torrent releases, automated software information and more.
- ents 13y agoAs someone who joined news blur after the reader shutdown, I hate to say it, but this seemed inevitable. The design was incredibly confusing (not to mention hideous) and there were so many options nested in so many menus that any time I needed to change something I could never find the option. I switched to feedbin since it had some semblance of design, was easy to understand and synced with many more apps. Also, I was credited three free years for being an early adopter and I suspect many others were as well, so I really doubt a big revenue bump anytime soon.
- stephen_mcd 13y agoCheck out https://kouio.com https://kouio.com if you're looking for something visually clean and simple.
- mrec 13y agoYeah, I'm really enjoying Kouio. Even the very Mac-style UI has stopped bothering me. Still a few missing features around the feeds list sidebar, but nothing critical. I really wish they'd start charging for it.
- werid 13y agoWhat is this that seems inevitable? You do realize that the graph will spike up again once all those who signed up around the shutdown period (from now until it actually shutdown) renews for another year. And design, yea, at first glance. Much like some advanced software looks ridiculous at first glance. I tested a lot of different readers before I eventually ended up at newsblur, am very happy with it.
- manish_gill 13y agoI've been really, really happy with Inoreader (It's free). They just revamped their UI too! Link: http://beta.inoreader.com/ http://beta.inoreader.com/
- epsylon 13y agoSame here. Super happy, though I'm still a free user.
- publicfig 13y agoTheir page shows no examples of the app itself, and no demos. Everything seems to be hidden behind a registration. That's incredibly unfortunate.
- Tyr42 13y agoI'm quite happy too. I like that you can push to instapaper if you want too, to read on the kindle.
- VikingCoder 13y ago> all the air sucked out by Google I don't think that's fair. Google Reader was Blockbuster Video. It lacked the personality of all of the RSS Aggregators (aka mom'n'pop rental stores), but it looked nice, it had most of what you were looking for, and the price was fair (lol). But it was a giant, faceless and unchanging monolith. Well, the brick and mortar rental DVD market is dead. And so is the cloud RSS aggregator market. Is it Blockbuster's fault that DVD rental died? No. It got replaced by better things. Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu+... Cloud RSS Aggregation sure felt nice, but as a business, I'm not convinced it was at all sustainable. Being an inherently read-only medium, where you have to maintain a huge library of content to be useful, is shaky ground to me. We like the technical idea of RSS, but we all read Facebook, Reddit, and HN. Why is that?
- bentcorner 13y agoWhat would be interesting (technical feasibility aside) would be a community aggregator spin on a RSS feed. Let me use an RSS feed as normal but expose all the different communities on top of that as additional data. To me Facebook is all kid pictures and life hacks posting, interesting only when I want to see what my family is up to. Reddit/HN are interesting for: a.) Posts I haven't seen before, and b.) Comments RSS solves neither, but it provides frequent updates for sites I'm interested in, which is a non-goal for reddit/HN. There's an interesting intersection between the two (RSS & social sites) in the comments. Why can't I see what other people have said about a story in my RSS feed? I wouldn't be surprised if this hasn't be done before, but I haven't seen any RSS application/site do this.
- onli 13y ago> I wouldn't be surprised if this hasn't be done before, but I haven't seen any RSS application/site do this. Have a look at bazqux: https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/
- taeric 13y agoTo be fair, I believe there are a few B&M rental stores doing alright. They just aren't the giants that we all remember. I think that is a digression, though. As is the concern of "we all read on ____". Because, first off, we don't. Quite a lot of us still read RSS feeds. I don't think many RSS feeds disappeared, just a big tool to read them. What far fewer of us do, is talk about the things we read on RSS, because it is not an inherently social tool. Consider, if I find a neat article in an rss feed, the only way I can talk about it with my peers is to post it on facebook/g+/twitter. Which is what Google Reader actually managed to bring to the table for RSS. I could share stories and have conversations in my peer groups. This actually even worked with Google Buzz. It was surprisingly nice. The problem there, I think, is all of these conversations happened with no real intrusion from ads. Google had no real way to put "sponsored" stories into my rss feeds without it being glaringly obvious. There was no "trending now" feed that I was willing to subscribe to.
- joosters 13y agoand in a world of casual readers who don’t care where their news is coming from so long as it’s in their interests and matches their biases, NewsBlur is the coffee equivalent of the AeroPress. What rot. Using an RSS reader doesn't magically free you from your own biased news sources. If anything, it insulates you more into your own bubble.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y agoNewsblur has a "global shared stories" tab but its mostly just popular nerd sites like HN and Dilbert comics and Wired that I have no interest in.
- wpietri 13y agoHe's not saying RSS readers magically free you from your own biases news sources. What he's pointing at is people's indifference to source as long as it's comfortable. That's in contrast to a newsreader, where you hand-select your sources. I think the group he's talking about includes people who get all their news from one comfortable source and those who get all their news socially, which is also generally comfortable. Hand-selecting sources for a feed reader doesn't guarantee that you'll end up with stuff that doesn't match your biases. In my case, though, I specifically include sources that are solid ones but that don't match my biases. So an RSS reader at least makes that possible.
- donniezazen 13y agoI have stopped consuming news through RSS readers because no one organize can produce quality work on a consistent basis. With limited amount of time I need a system that would tell me newsworthiness of an item. I have come to a conclusion that crowdsourced news is the best form of news reading. I have been slowly trying to read all my news on Google+, HN, and Reddit.
- wpietri 13y agoWhat this misses for me is solid pieces that aren't hugely popular. There are a number of sources that I don't want to miss. This includes things that friends write. But the ones I really treasure are the people who are interesting alternative voices, the ones who in 5 years time might turn out to have been 5 years ahead of everybody else. If you read what everybody else is reading, you'll only know what everybody else knows.
- donniezazen 13y agoI tend to fall into I-have-to-follow-everything-category stealing time that I could spend creating stuff that other folks might have not imagined.
- wpietri 13y agoYeah, that's a risk. It's not a big problem for me now, but then my must-read category is pretty small.
- jasonkester 13y agoSince NewsBlur's pricing model seems to built on annual recurring payments, It would seem that the interesting part of that graph is hidden just off to the right. How many of those panicked conversions are going to stick with the service, now that all the excitement has died down and they've had a whole year to really make up their mind as to whether a newsreader is something they need to be paying for. Here's hoping the answer is yes. Looking forward to a followup in a few months time!
- mercer 13y agoI hope so too. I'll probably stick with NewsBlur because I'm happy enough with it, and because I can't be bothered to find something better.
- d23 13y agoSpeaking only for myself, I know they lost me as a customer primarily because the system was buggy at the time they launched and promoted themselves on HN. I know there wasn't much time to respond to Reader's shutdown, but it just reminded me that when you get that first burst of traffic, you better be sure you can retain the folks you get.
- conesus 13y agoNo kidding it was buggy. But a year of work has moved NewsBlur far ahead. It's quite stable now. And it's the fastest reader on the market. That's why I graph average load times on the dashboard. The re-design also didn't launch until May, so your first impression last year will be quite different than this year.
- batmansbelt 13y agoIs it better than feedspot?
- acdha 13y agoGive it another try: it's at least as good as Google Reader ever was now.
- kasbah 13y agoI just have to tag on this post and mention the replacement that I stuck with: http://goread.io http://goread.io It's open-source with a free hosted service. It works really well for me. I have been very impressed with the progress since inception and am subscribed to a monthly donation.
- mjibson 13y agoI'm going to write a similar year-in-review story for goread.io.
- randyl 13y agoI misread the headline, and thought it was saying NewsBlur is shutting down one year after Google Reader. I used NewsBlur for a while, but didn't like the UI. I switched to InoReader.com, and love it.
- conesus 13y agoHey HN, NewsBlur's founder here. Just wanted to clear up a misconception about revenue. 1. The revenue (income/expenses) graph shows 16 months, not 12. Cut it off at March 2013 and you'll see a much healthier picture of NewsBlur's revenue. 2. Expenses are where they are because I let them get there. Notice that it's over 2/3rds payroll and subcontractors. That means it's all being invested back into NewsBlur. If I had to, I could easily cut down expenses, but then I wouldn't be building a better reader. I'm paying myself and my few subcontractors a healthy salary, which means we are sustainable at this rate. And even with expenses where they are, as I've seen somebody do the math, revenue (which is recurring and will spike this month) far outpaces expenses. I don't show the dollar figures here, but there's enough in profit to hire a full-time engineer, which is something I plan to do with that secret project I alluded to at the end.
- peelman- 13y agoThat makes me happy. I remember you mentioning somewhere before about having reached sustainability.
- gleb 13y agoI'd month-normalize this chart. Otherwise it looks to support the opposite conclusion of what you are trying to say.
- laza 13y agoHappy NewsBlur user here, and thank you for making it!
- b0b0b0b 13y agoI really wanted prismatic to be the replacement for google reader, but after a year with it I still feel like I have lots of unmet needs.
- easyfrag 13y agoMy favourite aggregator Feedbin had its 1st birthday a few days ago. http://blog.feedbin.com/2014/03/11/feedbins-first-year/ http://blog.feedbin.com/2014/03/11/feedbins-first-year/
- wnevets 13y agoand I havent missed it a single day. I'm sure 98% of google's users feel the same.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tw268 13y agoI wish there were a newsreader that looked good without the fancy algorithms, like a newsblur without the terrible UI. Like the old Google Reader
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y agoI'm a premium newsblur user and it feels slow and sluggish (with +/- 800 feeds and about 10k unreads right now), and I really wish it had search, but I'm sticking with it for now.
- pbreit 13y agoWith Reader's departure my Google use has dropped 50-90%. I don't think it was the best move.
- rip747 13y agowhat's funny is i remember last year, crying and moaning about the google reader shutdown and scrambling to find a new newsreader. never really found one that fit the bill like google reader did. its been a year now and i honestly don't miss google reader one bit. HN has become my news readers now :)