Rory Prior, developer of NewsLife, a competing feed reader:
Honestly I am a little bitter about this, what NewsGator has done is effectively anti-competitive, NNW has somewhere between 10 to 17% of the entire RSS market (that’s across all platforms) and probably 70% or more of the Mac share (I’ve not been able to dig up any conclusive figures on this however). To suddenly make that product free is obviously going to decimate the competition.
For what it’s worth — and keep in mind that DF’s traffic almost certainly isn’t representative of the Mac market as a whole — NetNewsWire utterly dominates the desktop feed reader share in my server logs. According to Mint, 16 percent of my feed traffic goes to NetNewsWire users, and another 19 percent goes to NewsGator online, much of which I suspect goes to NNW users with synching turned on. The only other desktop apps that account for 1 percent or more of my feed traffic are Vienna (2%), Firefox (1%), and NewsFire (1%). For comparison, Google Reader has 10 percent, and AppleSyndication (the framework for RSS in Safari) is under 1 percent.