I don’t know about you but I have been noticing less and less content in my Google Reader lately, probably a few months – but I bet the trend has been going on longer.  I subscribe to 200+ RSS feeds and haven’t added many in the last 6 months (I realize there will be some churn in who is creating content) but I’m convinced it’s more like a fundamental shift in content consumption than the particular feeds I happen to subscribe to.

Figured I would use Reader.Google.com (Google Reader) and look at the trends in my own consumption first – but the trends are only for the last 30 days, they don’t cover a year or two timeframe I need.

Proving that RSS is on it’s way out isn’t an easy  – I tried finding “Google Reader” in Comscore, and could not locate it, it’s not captured in Alexa at all, as a subdomain of Google and it’s very incompletely captured by Compete.com.   But the data in Compete doesn’t draw a clear picture that RSS feeds are being less consumed – though I did find one indicator they might well be – the average stay  was 18 seconds in duration last year and 13 seconds this August (the latest month Compete has data on as of today).

Now, I don’t claim this “13 seconds” of time spent per visit per month  matches the real time spent in a visit – but it might suggest that consumption of information has, indeed, shifted away from RSS feeds to Facebook, FriendFeed (and FriendFeed was bought by Facebook recently) and Twitter.

It’s much as Steve Rubel of Edelman predicted.

We’re talking about a lot less time being spent on Google Reader – but far more time spent in Twitter and Facebook – where much of the same information is available and linked to.

I’m suspecting this is what happened.   Sure, sometimes I’ll go to bed and wake up and find 600+ new items my Google Reader to consume, if I want – but lately, I’ll go to bed and wake up and may 100 or 200 items are present for me to read the next day.

I think there’s been a fundamental shift in how information is consumed that’s taken hold.  I wish the rest of the data I looked at was as clear as the two charts I placed above – but they’re not.