Life after Google Reader: yes, Feedly is still winning

Wondering who’s benefiting from a world without Google Reader? It seem the answer is fairly clear: Feedly. The RSS reader took an early lead once Google announced it was sun setting its own product, gaining more than half a million new users in two days, but it seems that isn’t the only impressive stat Feedly can claim — it is also the RSS reader referring the most traffic overall, according to new research from Parse.ly.

According to the analytics startup, from 1-31 July 2013, Feedly referred over 7-million unique visitors to its network of partner sites, dominating competitors like Pulse and the Old Reader. Its statistics, which are based on 5-billion page views and 160-million unique visitors to Parse.ly partners ranging from The Atlantic and Reuters to Ars Technica and Mashable, give a glimpse into how popular Feedly became in the month following Google Reader’s shut down.

Feedly, with its suite of mobile apps and browser extensions, became the go-to option for Google Reader devotees with its simple import and registration process. It also cloned the Reader API to ensure its users didn’t lose their subscriptions after the product’s July 1 demise and rapidly scaled up its infrastructure investments to keep pace with the sign ups. Since then, it’s gone on to manage some 25-million feeds and gained 8-million users since Google’s announcement. Quite a growth spurt.

If you’ve been watching the climbing number of visits to your site from cloud.feedly.com, you’re not the only one. Parse.ly’s research suggests that Feedly is also climbing the ranks of top referrers to its partner sites, beating out the likes of Linkedin, Digg, Tumblr and Wikipedia.

Interestingly, Parse.ly’s report also puts Feedly way ahead of Pulse, the new reader which was acquired by LinkedIn for US$90-million earlier this year, but behind Pinterest, Twitter and the likes of paid content service OutBrain, which allows publishers to display related content on their sites. Of course, all of these are secondary to Facebook and Google, as the world’s two most popular websites are still dominating, referring 73-million and 300-million page views respectively.