In the last few months, we've had the "big three" RSS news readers for the Mac switch from paid to free. First it was endo by Infinite-sushi, maker of the popular blog editing application ecto. Then NetNewsWire, the king of the hill news reader on the Mac for years recently acquired by NewsGator, decided to make the leap to free. Though with NetNewsWire, at least NewsGator still has a revenue stream available to support the app.

And now David Watanabe, creator of Acquisition, Xtorrent and Inquisitor for Safari, has made NewsFire available for free.

Now we can all believe that endo and NewsFire were moved to a free model due to "other priorities" as both authors claim — But let's be realistic instead. Once NetNewsWire switched to free, there was absolutely no chance for any other RSS reader to make a buck... none, nada, zero, zilch! As it was, even NetNewsWire was having a hard time competing with the free Google Reader.

For the record, in looking at the stats for The Graphic Mac; 45% of the RSS subscribers do so using Google Reader, while another 15% use NetNewsWire, 8% with Safari/Mail, 8% with Bloglines, 7% with Netvibes and the rest with other obscure readers like NewsFire, My Yahoo, Vienna, Rojo, Firefox Live Bookmarks and Flock. So in looking at these statistics, it's quite easy to see that none of the desktop apps really had much of a chance against the Google juggernaut anyway.

Much like Web browsers, I could never see how these companies expected to make a buck displaying content that was free to begin with. It's not that I don't think these developer's deserve the money for these excellent apps, but we just don't live in a time where you can make money off apps such as an RSS reader. Even a company as well established as Omni probably couldn't sustain itself on sales of OmniWeb - one of the best Web browsers available for the Mac (and the only one I'm aware of that costs money). People just don't expect to have to pay for a Web browser or RSS reader, no matter how good it is. They'll happily use an inferior product that doesn't cost anything.

As for me, I use NetNewsWire because I love its feature list, it's stable and can handle virtually everything I throw at it. I also have most of my feeds set up in Google Reader, simply so it shows up in a feed list on my browser homepage (iGoogle).