CATEGORIES
- WEB STARTUPS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB JOBS
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- VIDEO
- AMAZON
- ALL TOPICS
CONTRIBUTORS
Say Bye Bye to Full RSS Feeds
My column on InformationWeek this week asks the following question, “Will 2010 Mean The End Of The Full RSS Feed?”
Here’s a snippet from the column, “Over the past few months I’ve noticed more media sites (e.g. blogs, news sites, etc.) moving to partial RSS feeds. The New York Times only offers partial RSS feeds. InformationWeek runs partial RSS feeds. However most blogs are still offering full RSS feeds.
As Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and other social services have grown, so has the ability for these services to send good quality, monetizable traffic to media sites. Users who complained for years that they would only read content in a full RSS feed are clicking links inside social streams like never before. Many media sites post all of their links inside their social media streams. And once a user reaches the media site, they are more likely to interact with the site which drives even more pageviews and in turn, revenue.”
Former RSS user Robert Scoble is now sharing links via Twitter (and therefore Friendfeed). Users are clicking on his shared links and the users are taken to the respective full, rich, advertising-heavy media sites.
Naturally readers will make a lot of noise if their favorite blog removes full feeds. From our research in the CenterNetworks Labs, we’ve determined that the typical “noise” period on the Internet lasts two weeks. After that readers will be clicking links in partial feeds and will read the content on the full, chock full of ads media site. Typically one of the arguments related to partial feeds is around mobile reading. With the new crop of mobile devices including the Droid, iPhone 3Gs and the new Google Nexus One, mobile browsing is much smoother than how mobile browsers displayed content years ago.
One of the main reasons I see the feed switch coming this year is because in-feed advertising has basically been non-existant. The nice revenue stream that the old pre-Google Feedburner was providing is gone. Media sites will need to replace that source of income somehow.
Over the next week I am planning to take a deeper look at how one of the popular content scraper media sites uses partial RSS feeds for maximum revenue benefit.
Please have no fear…full RSS feeds will still be available — to receive them you will pay $1/feed.
Allen,
Every once in a while you bring up the $1 per feed topic. I always respond that $1 is way too much. I subscribe to 107 feeds right now. I’m not paying $107 per month, nor is anyone else. Publishers really need to consider something like $.10 or $.20 MAX. Maybe $1.50 to $2.00 per year. Otherwise, you will see your feed subscriptions disappear.
I would expect that many people might also consider abandoning the blog outright in outrage. I’m quite certain I would. I don’t mind paying for content but it has to be reasonable and inline with the subscribers perceived worth of the content. I could easily walk away from 90% of the blogs I read.
Not everybody is as crazy as Scoble.
Sites that don’t offer full feeds are sites that I don’t read.
And no, I won’t pay a buck for them either. I’ll switch to another site that offers what I want. The notion that somebody can charge for content is fundamentally flawed, because content is fungible. Your content is not special. If you don’t offer it in the form people want, then people will simply leave and find their content elsewhere.
As I understand it nobody is using feed readers any longer. They get their news feeds and links from Twitter and other sources. Perhaps with the killing of full feeds it kills the use of the reader and the rest of the source?
This is a humorous comment that obviously comes from an individual who doesn’t read very much online. Jim, I presume that you’re an older man, possibly post 45, who has a genuine interest in online media theory and execution, but isn’t out there utilizing tools that help an professional intake hundreds of media feeds and articles daily.
People follow RSS feeds because theyre intrigued by a certain author or site’s perspective, connections, and content. RSS readers provide an intuitive GUI for reading these feeds without the distraction of conventional ad inventory on websites.
Twitter, at least at this point in time, is a primitive tool that calls for clicking on headlines, fed by the owner of the twitter account, to shortened urls (non-descript and useless in value because they don’t carry the site or article name in the url). Feed readers like Google Reader often give you a full RSS feed including headline, full body content, and any accompanying rich media. The value proposition offered by this type of service is huge, and if you have read any metrics lately, RSS readers are penetrating a wider demographic reach every day.
Twitter has a very limited adoption, primitive listing and aggregation technology, and at this point has very primitive link-sharing offerings for interested media consumers. (At least in comparison to sharing via Google reader, other rss aggregators)