One of the key tenets of web 2.0 technologies was to let people consume content in whatever way they want. Following that line, providing full articles via RSS has become almost a dogma in the "new media" set. However, I think that technophiles who are enamored with RSS and RSS readers are losing sight of some core business issues as well as some fundamental web 2.0 trends that will ultimately, in my opinion, lead to the demise of the full RSS feed. Heresy you say? Well, if you are reading this post in a full text RSS reader, you can't tell me what you think about my profaning full-text RSS feeds. And, therein, lies reason #1:– As John Battelle has written, Web 2.0 (oh, how I hate that term) is conversational media. Full text RSS feeds are unidirectional or dictation. It limits the conversation that Web 2.0 was meant to encourage. You can engender greater conversation and more interaction by putting out headlines or headlines plus 30 words and thereby encourage people to come back to your site and comment. This encouraged interaction/conversation is good. Online sociability is important and, ultimately, it is more web 2.0 than full RSS feeds are. Moreover, RSS feeds do not include comments as they build on a post.
Reason #2: Web 2.0 is all about tinkering and measuring, tinkering and measuring. Website owners want and need to release new features and new content, get user feedback, measure it, and iterate the product or offering. While Feedburner's stats are a good start, a couple of my companies have found them very unreliable and difficult to set up if you have many feeds. If you can't rely on your RSS stats and you can't measure then you do not know if you are serving the users well. This is yet another reason to bring people back to your site so you can measure their interaction on a granular level and improve your product. Let's use one of my portfolio companies, Seeking Alpha, as an example. Seeking Alpha has over 6,500 RSS feeds (one for every stock ticker, sector, author and theme) and about 200,000 RSS subscribers. But it doesn't really know how many, because it hasn't had the resources to set up a huge number of feeds with Feedburner.
Reason #3: Measurement is also critical for the Web 2.0 business model - advertising. If you can't measure RSS properly then you can't set prices for advertisers. Consequently, ads in RSS feeds currently generate a fraction of the revenue of ads on a website (see Scott Karp's post today on online advertising economics as further indication). If we are already on the unholy topic of business models or ads, the anonymity of RSS feeds, both in terms of registration and usage patterns, makes those readers less monetizable. This may seem too Adam Smith for the creative commons generation but something needs to keep the free content flowing on the web. Let's again use Seeking Alpha as an example. I mentioned above that Seeking Alpha has 200,000 RSS subscribers. It also delivers over 300,000 emails a day. When a reader signs up on email, you have there subscription information and an email address. That information enables you to target an ad more accurately to that subscriber. As Daily Candy and other email businesses have proven, good old email is a monetizable channel. RSS is not.
Reason #4: Consuming content via RSS means readers miss changes to web sites. Web sites are dynamic organisms. They are changing all the time. If you read content via a full text RSS reader you miss the evolution of content. Again, let me use Seeking Alpha as an example. More than once I have heard from readers of Seeking Alpha a comment along the following lines. "“I subscribe to a site called internetstockblog (Seeking Alpha'’s original name) but I did not know that they now cover about 5000 stocks and 20+ sectors of stock market. All I get is the internet content. Good thing you told me."
Reason #5: The truth is that most readers via RSS want headlines only. Feedburner's recent study confirms that trend. It turns out that most people want headlines rather than entire articles via RSS. And it makes sense: The most innovative uses for RSS are in customizable home pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes (Benchmark company). There's not much unique formatting you can do for full articles, since they're going to take an entire page whatever. Additionally, I have a sense (no empirical evidence) that RSS readers are a Silicon Valley and blogger phenomenon (a self reinforcing crowd). Mainstream users are getting their RSS feeds (or just feeds since they likely don't know what RSS is) on MyYahoo.
I have seen the drawbacks of full text RSS at numerous companies at this point and the observations above are the accumulation of feedback from the companies and readers. You may suggest that the problem is the RSS readers and not full-text RSS per se. Maybe. But until the RSS readers evolve to more closely mimic the web experience, I think that full-text RSS feeds will whither. As the web evolves through its 2.0 stage to a 3.0 stage, increased engagement and conversation will far outweigh whatever personal consumption advantages there are to full text RSS feeds. Really Simple Syndication will revert to plumbing like any good acronym should and the grand internet symphony will play even louder.
Feel free to comment. That is: comment if you can and are not reading this on a full text RSS reader.
22 Comments:
Michael, on this we disagree. It's like selling razors to Chinese.
"If I have 1 billion Chinese and I can sell one razor to each male once in his lifetime, I'll sell half a billion razors…
But Chinese people don’t shave."
Is it good to drive traffic to your site? Sure. Will you increase revenue from advertising, tweak content, improve the service? Hell ya!
Is this what your readers want? No. There is nothing in the feedburner article that implies users don’t want full feeds, it just says MyYahoo has many users and those users see headlines. It's quite possible people actually don’t want headlines but work with MyYahoo for different reasons (Habit, useful features etc.).
Most people that are subscribed to more than 10 blogs will not want to browse to each site separately just to find out what the article is about (headlines rarely give a true notion). It's insane. The whole point of using a reader is to have aggregation capabilities. This is a personal opinion, of course. It would be nice to know the average number of blogs a MyYahoo user is subscribed to.
Personally, I unsubscribe from any blog that does not give me the full feed. If I have a comment to post (and I am a commenter – point in case), than I click the headline, browse to the actual blog, and post a comment. That's exactly what I'm doing now for this post.
Now here's an idea for a startup – create a solution to this problem that will not worsen the experience of the user. I'd love to be able to post comments from within my reader. I'm willing to take it up if you're willing to provide the funding ;)
I agree. The problem is that the feeds contain too little information (i.e. no comments, or for that matter, ads), not too much. I have no hard data, but anecdotally I'd say that people are trying to get more information faster. Having abbreviated RSS feeds means that the users get either less information, or more, but a whole lot slower. I say we upgrade RSS. Shamshins - go for it.
I used to use a full feed reader, and now I use one that shows headlines only. That's because readers like Rojo and Bloglines force you to work through tons of headlines, checking what you want. The newest readers are basically fully configurable home pages, like netvibes. They allow you to see much more information in one page. If you're then going to open an article having seen only a headline, what difference does it make if you open it on the blog's website or in the reader? So I don't mind if site provide headlines only, because the most innovative readers now show only headlines in any case. And if it means the site can invest in better content, that's got to be better for me as a reader.
shamshins said "Will you increase revenue from advertising, tweak content, improve the service? Hell ya! Is this what your readers want? No."
I mostly agree with that, because the content on most sites is just a commodity, so you don't really care if they make money or not, because if you don't read their posts you'll read someone else's.
But I think you're right with seeking alpha (which I use every day) for one reason -- they provide transcripts and a daily news summary that you can't get anywhere else. If I have to go to their site to allow them to give this stuff away for free, I'm happy to do it.
I use Bloglines, which gives me the full text of RSS feeds, and I tend to read the feeds which give me full text and delete the ones that don't. But now some full text feeds such as paidcontent.org are including "sponsored posts" and other forms of advertising, sometimes disguised as content. So at the end of the day, these business models will find a way to support themselves, and the question is then what's worse for the reader -- an RSS reader filled with sponsored posts, ads and other garbage, or ads on a website.
Michael, you're totally right on this one. I used to use Rojo, and had a ton of feeds I'd check every day. Now I've stopped using it entirely, as I just don't have time for all those blog posts and the reader wasn't particularly user friendly. Instead I visit a few sites that I trust every day. Many of my friends tell me they've done the same thing. So I want the sites that I visit to constantly improve, and don't care about full text RSS feeds.
There are as many good reasons to keep full feeds on a blog and i tend to believe the future will give us a mix of both. There is nothing more irritating for a regular reader of a blog to stop in the middle of his post and then open his browser. I know these are only a few tens of seconds but repeated on a many blogs every day this does not work
I believe content editors should publish two kind of feeds
- full feeds with advertising (tools and stats are not missing for that)
- partial feeds ad-free
i don't even know how to use an rss feed.
hi michael,
i read this post on the netvibes full reader and clicked the title to come by and comment (as i've commented before). i am a former myyahoo user and found that format too limiting. i think your points are well made, but i'm more than happy to remain on my reader page only, unless something intrigues me to comment myself or see others' comments.
I just want to comment on point #1 you made here, Michael. I read a lot of feeds, and do a ton of my online reading in NetNewsWire. If I find a post compelling or worthy of discussion, I guarantee I'll click through and comment on it. The fact that I have to follow thru to a browser to comment is not a major deterrent. This very well could be different for more casual RSS readers who are using MyYahoo or the like.
Regarding following comments in feeds -- I agree that is still a difficult issue. Comment feeds are a partial solution, but not a very good one. Tim Bray has some thoughts and good followup discussion here, but no clear solution yet.
thanks for the thoughtful post,
- Rob
(disclaimer: I am Seeking Alpha employee, however the views expressed here are mine only and not my employer's.)
Publishers will monetize content in some way. If the distribution of content is "free", such as full text RSS, they'll embed ads, sponsored posts, or other stuff in the feed.
The reason why full-text RSS is so good now is that publishers haven't acted on that, and are still trying to build audiences with free content that they're not monetizing. But once they get more serious about monetization, the user experience of full text RSS feeds will collapse, as users will have to navigate though a ton of noise in their readers. And guys like shamshins who say "Personally, I unsubscribe from any blog that does not give me the full feed" will feel VERY differently.
Think about video on the 'net: the guys who produce video are currently giving away much of it without ads. But does anyone think that will continue? Soon there will be ads in video that users won't be able to skip over. We'll long for the days of TV and Tivo...
Rob, you missed Michael's point in #1: the problem isn't "following comments in feeds". It's that if you don't see the comments, you can't react to them. So your comment, for example, had no relationship with the comments before it, because by your own admission all you did was react to the post, not the comments left so far.
And a lot of what makes people comment is the other comments, not the post itself. Isn't that what "community" is all about?
I bet you won't even see this comment and know that someone replied to you...
Anon #5(?):
Actually, I did see your comment, and I read the responses before I commented the first time. Normally I do read the discussion before commenting myself, even if I clickthru from a reader, just to get the context.
- Rob
Full text RSS feeds are unidirectional or dictation. It limits the conversation that Web 2.0 was meant to encourage. You can engender greater conversation and more interaction by putting out headlines or headlines plus 30 words and thereby encourage people to come back to your site and comment.
Would you like me to post the first thirty words of my response to this here, and the remainder at my site? Would that be convenient?
Don't turn news into a treasure hunt.
But Rob there are still two problems. First, how are you tracking whether there are replies to your comments you made on other sites a while back? If you visited their web pages, they show new comments, but you'll never see new comments if you only read via RSS.
And second, what got you to comment in the first place here was the post itself, not the other comments. Sure, you might have read the other comments before you posted yours, but sometimes an earlier comment makes somene want to comment, and not a post.
Anyone who thinks about community understands that Michael is right when he says that RSS is a uni-directional technology.
The problem is that RSS has become a dogma for the Web 2.0 crowd, even when it conflicts with other dogmas (like "community").
I was reading seekingalpha on my phones rss reader, on a daily basis. until this move. and no, email is no replacement - email is for important stuff only, which a newsfeed definetly isn't. farewell seekingalpha, it's time to move on.
anon: Full feed RSS is not dogma, its just another tool in the toolbox that happens to work really well for some people.
There are tools to track comment threads, like cocomment (http://cocomment.com/), which actually alerted me to your comment here. Its not perfect, but I think cocomment or a competitor will be built in to many blogs and browsers in a few years.
Besides, the problem of watching comments you are interested in isn't limited to RSS -- continuously revisiting all posts you've commented on doesn't really work, either. Thats where something like cocomment comes in.
- Rob
RSS feeds serve a good purpose but can also be detrimental to site traffic.
But not everyone is interested in reading the comments.
But the basic blog itself is fully formed Web 2.0 even without comments.
Web 2.0 is not just about measuring and tinkering, but also the freedom to easily gather and distribute information in whatever form or format you want.
trying to monetize your feed is pretty much a useless endeavor. rss ads generate negligable revenue and, as the comment above confirms, partial feeds do not drive folks back to the site.
giving away your content via a full feed is basically giving away your content for free. that's exactly what rss was designed for. if your site is ad-supported, and you're worried about lost revenue due to rss, don't have an rss feed.
Would you like me to post the first thirty words of my response to this here, and the remainder at my site? Would that be convenient?
And therein lies the problem with partial feeds: content creators don't realize they need to sell each post to the reader.
I'm a big fan of full-content feeds and (at least philosophically) counted myself as part of the "full content only" camp, though that is changing.
I think partial feeds work well if the creator makes an attempt to make them useful. The problem lies in partial feeds that display the beginning of the post and then abruptly cut off -- how is a reader to know if they actually want to spend the time reading the article based entirely on the title and a small snippet of your inane opening banter? This wouldn't be a problem if everyone knew how to engage a reader in their writing, but alas, it's not too common.
Compare this with something like John Gruber's partial feed, which typically has an informative title, coupled with an actual explanation of what the post will cover, written specifically for the feed. When you see a post on his partial feed, you know whether or not you're going to be wasting your time by clicking through to the article or not.
Another Gruber example is the paid subscription getting a full feed, which seems to be a good way to monetize feeds.
I think partial feeds can work if an effort is made to ensure they are useful. And on another note, they can hone the quality of the traffic your site receives through the feed, as you'll be able to gauge what those readers are interested in more easily than by basing it on what posts receive comments.
And it turns out my comment is directed to the conversation, not the initial post...
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