Feedly adds 3M new users in 2 weeks, updates mobile apps, and plans premium version

With Google set to kill off Google Reader as of July 1, Feedly has emerged as a popular alternative for those in search of a new RSS reader. Feedly announced Monday that it’s picked up 3 million new users since Google announced the end of Reader on March 13. (500,000 of those came in the first two days following the announcement.) That brings the company’s total number of active users to 7 million. And the company’s cofounder Cyril Moutran tells me that the company is planning to launch a paid premium version for power users.

Mobile updates

feedly 2 Today Feedly is rolling out a new version of Feedly Mobile, with improved discovery, search and sharing features, for iOS and Android devices. Users can search over 50 million feeds and can browse by topic. “The more you use Feedly to search, categorize and follow your favorite feeds, the better our search and discovery will become,” the company writes in its blog post announcing the changes. There’s also a new Must-Reads section. These same search and discovery features will be added to Feedly’s Chrome, Firefox and Safari apps later today.

For former Google Reader users, Feedly has added a new title-only view to its mobile apps “to make scanning of headlines more efficient” (and more similar to Google Reader’s condensed view). The company had already added that list view to its web apps.

Finally, there are some new sharing options on mobile: In addition to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, mobile users can now share to Google+ and Buffer (a site that manages sharing to multiple social networking services) and can save articles to Pocket and Instapaper. Those features were already available on Feedly’s web versions.

What’s next: A paid premium version and a service for publishers

Cofounder Moutran told me in an email that “a significant proportion” of its users say they’d be willing to pay for Feedly. The company plans to launch a premium, subscription-based version of the service later this year. It will include features like better Evernote and Dropbox integration.

In addition, Moutran said, the company sees Feedly as a “marketplace that facilitates the discovery, consumption and sharing of great content…We have been working with publishers, and intend to offer an easy way for our users to discover, purchase and access premium content.”