Not much going on lately, so I though why not bring a thread Chet (@oraclenerd) and I had going over email to light.
Last week, Google Reader was acting up, and I mused that it might not matter since no one used it anyway. That led to a declaration that RSS was dead, although I suppose feeds is more accurate, and a chat with the ‘nerd over email.
I’m worried about the future of feeds. Here’s why:
- They’re not widely adopted by casual interwebs users, but I, and many others, would go into shock without them.
- They cost content providers money to maintain.
- They steal pageviews and ad revenue from content providers.
RSS (and feeds) has been declared dead several times over the years, most recently in January. Reports of the demise have to date proven premature, which is great news.
However, many see the rise of link sharing on services like Twitter and Facebook as the latest death knell for feeds. Adding a social layer to link discovery opens up a wonderful (and horrible) way to find new content that entices many casual users who have never been enticed into feed readers. Plus, many long-time feed readers find more value from socialized link sharing than they did from classic feed readers.
So, I can see where that argument holds some value. Over the years, I’ve used Twitter for link discovery with mixed results; as the network has grown, the links get lost. Plus, the rise of URL shorteners has made clicking a dicey proposition.
Some also argue that apps like Flipboard, Feedly and the like have actually invigorated feeds. While I can see that this makes sense, many of these feeds are full content, which means people consume content without clicking though to the content site, which steals valuable pageviews and ad revenue. .
That’s no good if you’re a content provider. Adding and maintaining feeds of your content is a cost; it’s probably not a huge one, but when you add lost revenues, the content providers could begin to question the value of providing feeds at all.
Content providers want to get paid for their content. So, this would seem to lead to syndication deals, similar to what web portals like My Yahoo have dealt with since the late 90s.
So, the success of beautiful content aggregators could ultimately jeopardize their livelihood, or I suppose it could score them consulting deals. Either way, if Flipboard has to pay for some of its content, that cost will be passed to the user.
I love feeds and the open web, and it would be so disappointing to see them disappear in favor of syndicated content and social link sharing. Atom and RSS are immensely valuable, but they have always been tied to adoption by content providers, at least on the consumer side of the web.
Am I right to be concerned?
Find the comments.
The risk of going from an RSS feed for notifcations to a twitter feed, or similar timeline streamed flow, is that the latter can be more easily lost. The RSS item patiently waits until it is read or actively wiped.
Being down under, I can wake up in the morning when eight to ten hours of solid US peak time tweeting has passed me by. Or I could be in a work location where I can’t see a regular twitter feed.
If it is urgent, then tweet it. If it is important then RSS it (or email it).
Sure, I get that and agree. Feeds have great value on the consumption side. The problem is that casual users have never embraced feed reading. They gravitate to Twitter/Facebook or an app like Flipboard.
So, why would a producer continue to publish feeds if it’s a cost?
I’m not getting this linkjacking thing. I think providers put too much emotional investment in trying to get everyone to do some click, the value of driving eyeballs somewhere is distorted by the process. Feed consumers confuse volume for quality, making their own distortion of value. It’s all very unstable, death of usenet, news at 11-ish. In twenty years it won’t mean a thing.
Something missing after ”
…Twitter for link discovery with”
It depends on how much the cost truly is. If you’re already automatically sending feed content to your Twitter account and your Facebook page, I wouldn’t think that it would cost any more to provide a feed that could be accessed by a feed reader. And if you’re hiring a person to populate your Twitter and Facebook pages, that’s more costly than an automated process.
I’ve seen three strategies on the part of content providers to make sure that they continue to get revenue while offering a feed. First, there are content providers that do not get revenue directly from their content, so they don’t care where you read their content – on the site, or in a feed. I’d include Oracle in this group – most blog feeds from Oracle Corp. promote Oracle software merely by providing information about that software in the content – so Oracle doesn’t care where you read the content.
Second, I get feeds from the Washington Post, where only an abstract of the content is in the feed. They know that if I’m interested in reading more, I’ll click through to the site, where I’ll see the revenue generating ads.
Third, since feed content is often in HTML format, some content providers include the ads directly in the feed. I’m sure that this is a little complicated to make sure the ad revenue goes to the right people – the content provider, not the feed reader. Still, if done right, the content provider gets the revenue, no matter where you read the content.
Exactly right, but I see a few issues if Flipboard and its ilk really gain momentum. Partial feeds do drive the traffic, but only if there is interest. The excerpt given in a feed is usually longer than what you’d get from a search engine. So, I think there would still be a loss over the norm.
Ads in feeds work for some readers, but these are stripped out of Flipboard and co.
The problem is the pageviews and associated ad revenue. Piggybacking on someone’s content to drive your own ads is dirty pool. Nothing really to do with feeds.
Thanks for pointing out my open-ended sentence. I finished it.
Not really what I meant. There’s an IT spend associated with publishing and maintaining feeds for your content. Plus, there’s the loss in ad revenue associated with lost pageviews if someone like Flipboard is using your feed.
That cost varies, so I’m not sure if it’s major. Still, if Flipboard and the like gain real traction, what happens to feeds from big content sites out there?
The IT cost is minimal assuming you are using some CMS as feeds are either built-in or a free/cheap plugin. If someone is consistently publishing interesting / engaging content they get the page visits. If not, then that’s a different problem.
If Google are to be believed, this sort of content will not drive searches since they prioritize original content over syndicated content. In the past it would have worked great, but now… meh…
It depends if you are commercial blogging or not.
Most of us Oracle bloggers are not blogging commercially, so we don’t obsess about the title and summaries of our posts quite as much. I don’t even write an excerpt for my posts. Looking at those feeds that do provide just summaries on Orana, it seems the vast majority use the “show the first few characters” approach to their summary text. This is not the same as writing a specific excerpt for syndication to draw people in.Commercial bloggers will invest a considerable amount of time in picking a title and writing an excerpt to get maximum attention and draw numbers to the full article. If you are spending a lot of hours and only a couple of hundred people are using the feed is it really worth it?I guess this is what Jake is saying.
In relation to costs, remember, feeds have to be served, so they are using computing resources (database and app server). If enough content skimmers are hitting your feeds (then I guess you are really cool) then it will have a measurable impact on your systems performance. Are you happy about getting more CPU licenses for your database and app servers to support a free service. Once again, it depends on the blogging platform you are using as to if this affects you. If you are using wordpress.com or blogger, it makes no difference. If you are self hosting it could.
I think the reality for most casual bloggers, feeds are free and they blast them to multiple services. My own blog posts go to my feed, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, and are also passed through OraNA, my aggregator and the OakTable aggregator, so for one article, you might be unlucky and see about 8+ references, all at no “cost” to me. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Heh, built-in would be my problem, i.e. development costs for adding feeds aren’t necessarily born out by customer demand.
Pageviews come whether you’re interesting/engaging or not, trust me 🙂
For-pay bloggers are at the front of this movement against linkjacking and pageview loss bc those are their bread/butter. I’m also thinking about bigger content outlets like WSJ, NYT, Guardian, CNN, etc. very touchy about getting paid for their content. All it takes is a little success to ruin the party for the rest of us.
You mean content farms. Google is moving against them, but that’s a bit of an uphill climb. SEO can work around some of that too.