It's The Feed Stupid (continued)

I found this post by Dave Winer regarding the use of RSS feeds by major media companies at pc4media.

Dave makes a number of interesting points but i don't agree with most of them. Contrary to Dave's argument, I think RSS will reduce the traffic to the site. I am seeing that on my blog. More and more of my readers read my blog posts in a feed reader and do no visit my site unless they want to comment. I don't think that's bad because the traffic is shifting to another place, but its still traffic. Traffic is just a proxy for audience. Audience is what matters to a media company. I agree with Dave that RSS can increase the audience. But i also think RSS will reduce web site traffic.

I also think ads will absolutely be a big part of feeds. Dave doesn't like ads in his feed. He says, "I get the value when I read the full article, and there I don't mind an ad, but the aggregator window is mine, I paid for it, I paid for the Internet connection, like seeing ads before a movie (a practice I abhor) it doesn't seem fair for you to put ads in my space." I don't get that argument at all. Why is it OK to put ads in his browser window but not his feed window? Because he paid for the feed reader but not the browser? Come on Dave, that's silly.

So, where do i come out on all of this? First, RSS is an important new distribution medium for content of all kinds and any media company, large or small, needs to support RSS agressively in order to maximize its audience.

Second, RSS will be an ad supported medium. And I think it will be an extremely efficient ad supported medium because the feeds a person subscribes too will give the advertiser a lot of information from which to target ads. And that is a good thing for everyone.

Comments

[Colin Putney]

I think Dave is right. Feeds do increase site traffic. Think of it this way: the question is not how many people read your feed without visiting your web site. It's how many people visit your web site because they read your feed.

Clearly your feed will get more traffic than your site. I'm sure this is true of every syndicated site, particularly blogs. An aggregator is just way more convenient than a browser for sites we read regularly. But, the presence of the feed will also drive more traffic to your site, abeit at some fraction of the incremental increase in the size of your audience.

I'm a perfect example of this. I rarely visit your site in a browser - most of the time I just read your feed. But without the feed, I wouldn't visit your site at all. My aggregator has 36 subscriptions in it - I recently pared it down to a "bare minimum" of the sites and blogs I enjoy reading. I don't have time for much more, and I certainly don't have time to wade through my bookmarks several times a day, visiting each site and manually scanning through it to see if anything has changed.

It might not be immediately obvious, but you might be able to get a sense of this from the referers in your site logs. How many people that visit your site went there from your feed? That won't be all the incremental traffic your feed brings you, but it's probably a good chunk of it.

Another chunk will be traffic that come from other people's feeds or blog sites. If another blogger links to one of your posts, chances are very good that he read it in your feed, not your site, and is probably one of those people who wouldn't read your site at all without the feed.

I absolutely agree that audience is what's important, not traffic, but I think it's also important to note that increasing your audience, however you accomplish it, will increase your traffic as well.

[Tom Watson]

Fred, I've been working with RSS on and off for about 2 years - it definately builds traffic. For one, it gets a blog on a whole new set of lists - not sites, but feeds. And for another, most people get feeds in digest form and if they want to read more, they click through.
Finally, I think most feed readers are, in fact, bloggers themselves - eventually they want to comment, see what the site looks like, who's on it, what the community is like etc.

[Rauno Saarinen]

The importance I place on a feed is intimately related to the importance I place on visiting the Blog behind the feed - at some point, your Blog will need to connect and then periodically re-connect with me or your feeds will be deleted from my aggregator.

You don't make it onto my feed unless your Blog passes my initial visit test. And then, unless something (read more on a summarized item, comment, grab a permalink, take a look at a tool, ...) causes me to visit your Blog periodically -- bye, bye feed.

[hugh macleod]

RSS will evolve, just like HTML did. Watch this space etc.

I think you're right. Pull-media is more ergonomic than push-media.

[Adam Fritzler]

I read the RSS digested version via LiveJournal(.com) syndication. The digest appears on my 'friends page' (basically an aggregator, but with permission capability for posts), so I have to click through to get the full text of most feed. It's only minorly annoying to click through, and it also gives me an opportunity to read the comments, which aren't in the RSS.

And, you're not the first person to disagree with Mr Winer. He has a long history of being aggitating... :)

[Helmar Rudolph]

I fully agree with Colin Putney. A friend of mine passed on the blog entry to me, and now I have your feed installed in Opera 7.51. This way you can be assured that I visit your site whenever I am interested. And see... no advertising required for that. ;-)

But feeds are not only a massive bandwidth saver, but they almost ensure that nothing that you are interested in falls through the cracks. The next step in RSS evolution would be a client-side filter that only shows the feed entries that match your system or site-wide filter. (I am new to all this, so it may already exist, just not in Opera (yet)). And off goes the email to Jon, friend and CEO. :)