According to the latest research from Nielsen/NetRatings, only 11% of blog readers are using RSS for content consumption, with nearly 5% of those using desktop aggregators and more than 6% using web-services such as MyYahoo!

Another interesting point made:

“The majority of respondents to the survey were less familiar with RSS feeds. Among the other respondents, 23 percent understood RSS but did not use it, while 66 percent either did not understand the technology or had never heard of it.”

Research was conducted on the sample of 1,000 members of the Nielsen/NetRatings research panel who read blogs.

Now, the press release doesn’t give enough data to warrant a proper comment, but the findings themselves are not that surprising.

Even though blogs were the original driver behind RSS growth, that is changing with major media sites and even e-commerce sites providing RSS feeds, thus expanding the general reach of RSS beyond the blogosphere.

Furthermore, do these numbers mean that RSS is a lost cause for marketers?

Certainly not, it’s just that more mainstream tools need to provide RSS functionality out-of-the-box before RSS can really take off the ground for the “average internet consumer”.

MyYahoo! is already making it easier, and so are MSN, Google, Firefox and some other mainstream tools. But my money for the rise of RSS is still on the upcoming IE 7, which should be the key future driver of RSS adoption among consumers.

RSS is the way for marketers to go today, if they want to be ready for tomorrow, and at the same time leverage the existing RSS user-base, which is measured between 2% and 12% of the US online population.