Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It!

About 14 months ago, I responded to myriad “RSS is Dead” stories by asking you, my RSS readers, if you were really reading. At that point, Google’s Feedburner service was telling me I had more than 200,000 subscribers, but it didn’t feel like the lights were on – I mean, that’s a lot of people, but my pageviews were low, and with RSS, it’s really hard to know if folks are reading you, because the engagement happens on the reader, not here on the site. (That’s always been the problem publishers have had with RSS – it’s impossible to monetize. I mean, think about it. Dick Costolo went to Twitter after he sold Feedburner to Google. Twitter! And this was *before* it had a business model. Apparently that was far easier to monetize than RSS).

Now, I made the decision long ago to let my “full feed” go into RSS, and hence, I don’t get to sell high-value ads to those of you who are RSS readers. (I figure the tradeoff is worth it – my main goal is to get you hooked on my addiction to parentheses, among other things.)

Anyway, to test my theory that my RSS feed was Potemkin in nature, I wrote a December, 2010 post asking RSS readers to click through and post a comment if they were, in fact, reading me via RSS. Overwhelmingly they responded “YES!” That post still ranks in the top ten of any post, ever, in terms of number of comments plus tweets – nearly 200.

Now, put another way this result was kind of pathetic – less than one in 1000 of my subscribers answered the call. Perhaps I should have concluded that you guys are either really lazy, secretly hate me, or in fact, really aren’t reading. Instead, I decided to conclude that for every one of you that took the time to comment or Tweet, hundreds of you were nodding along in agreement. See how writers convince themselves of their value?

Which is a long way to say, it’s time for our nearly-yearly checkup. And this time, I’m going to give you more data to work with, and a fresh challenge. (Or a pathetic entreaty, depending on your point of view.)

Ok, so here’s what has happened in 14 months: My RSS feed has almost doubled – it now sports nearly 400,000 subscribers, which is g*dd*am impressive, no? I mean, who has FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND people who’ve raised their hands and asked to join your club? I’ve WON, no? Time for gold-plated teeth or somesh*t, right?

Well, no.

While it’s true that nearly 400,000 of you have elected to follow my RSS feed, the grim truth is more aptly told by what Google’s Feedburner service calls my “Reach.” By their definition, reach means “the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.”

And that number, as you can see, is pathetic. I mean, “click,” I can understand. Why click when you can read the full article in your reader? But “view”?! Wait, lemme do some math here….OK, one in 594 of you RSS readers are even reading my stuff. That’s better than the one in 1000 who answered the call last time, but wow, it’s way worse than I thought. Just *reading* doesn’t require you click through, or tweet something, or leave a comment.

Either RSS is pretty moribund, or, I must say, I am deeply offended.

What I really want to know is this: Am I normal? Is it normal for sites like mine to have .0017 percent of its RSS readers actually, well, be readers?

Or is the latest in a very long series of posts (a decade now, trust me) really right this time  – RSS is well and truly dead?

Here’s my test for you. If I get more comments and tweets on this post than I have “reach” by Google Feedburner status, well, that’s enough for me to pronounce RSS Alive and Well (by my own metric of nodding along, of course). If it’s less than 664, I’m sorry, RSS is Well And Truly Dead. And it’s all your fault.

(PS, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop using it. Ever. Insert Old Man Joke Here.)

573 thoughts on “Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It!”

  1. I read your posts (here in France) directly through Google Reader… And well, as you state it… you’d a have better view of your reach if you put a short part of your posts in the RSS. RSS is not dead (I follow 300 feeds) !  But it’s not so “simple” for common users. They better understand Facebook’s page subscribing.

    Reply

  2. I read your posts (here in France) directly through Google Reader… And well, as you state it… you’d a have better view of your reach if you put a short part of your posts in the RSS. RSS is not dead (I follow 300 feeds) !  But it’s not so “simple” for common users. They better understand Facebook’s page subscribing.

    Reply

  3. I read your posts (here in France) directly through Google Reader… And well, as you state it… you’d a have better view of your reach if you put a short part of your posts in the RSS. RSS is not dead (I follow 300 feeds) !  But it’s not so “simple” for common users. They better understand Facebook’s page subscribing.

    Reply

  4. I’ve got you in my RSS reader (NetNewsWire) and have for years, but this piece didn’t register with me as I went through my feeds this morning. But I noticed it when I happened to drop in to Google+, which I don’t do that often. I actually went back to see if this article was in your feed in my reader. It was. 

    So I still get the majority of my news (industry news, at least) from my RSS reader, and that’s how I usually read you. But the piece on whether anybody is out there in RSS land … I managed to pass over without noticing. 

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  6. FWIW, Google Reader. Rarely click through. Even more rare to click through and click an ad. Hmm. If I don’t have a login that this will accept, you’ll have lost a comment.

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  15. I never come here, I read you on Google reader and that’s it. I don’t like tweeter and I will never re-tweet anything, that’s a bad indicator of success.

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  21. Here is the thing, your post is too long and the call to action takes forever to show up. Try putting your last paragraph first and then illustrate by saying all the other things that appear on your post, most people won’t read them anyway. Best.

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  22. I subscribe to about 500 sites via RSS, including this one, despite the fact that Google has not only kneecapped the social features of Google Reader and failed to improve Feedburner in years, but GReader itself seems to be getting slower and slower…

    I also always include RSS options for people, not just for human readers and the search bots which also appear in Feedburner stats, but also for that massive Syndication element…

    Incidentally – I can’t remember if it was accurately fixed, but some microblogging services led to hugely inflated subscriber numbers on feedburner in the past…

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  31. I’m reading via RSS.  Not every article, but every headline – and clicking through the many an article along the way.

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  32. Sorry I missed commenting on your post last year! I truly read your posts (or at least most of them).  Thank you for being providing your very insightful posts and being a great balance to some of the crap out there.

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  33. Sorry I missed commenting on your post last year! I truly read your posts (or at least most of them).  Thank you for being providing your very insightful posts and being a great balance to some of the crap out there.

    P.S.  Sorry for any duplicates – I’m having a hard time posting my comments.  My Disqus account isn’t being saved and posting as a Guest isn’t working either.

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  37. Count me as a careful reader via RSS and generally an RSS junkie. 

    Compare that to the miserable experience of going to the page, finding the type is way smaller than what my eyes want, and that the comment box is not showing because my security setting block whichever of the twelve (yes 12!) separate external sites are runnig scripts here.  RSS is for definately what I want.

    Reply

  38. Count me as a careful reader via RSS and generally an RSS junkie. 

    Compare that to the miserable experience of going to the page, finding the type is way smaller than what my eyes want, and that the comment box is not showing because my security setting block whichever of the twelve (yes 12!) separate external sites are runnig scripts here.  RSS is for definately what I want.

    Reply

  39. I read every single post here. I use google reader and i didnt even know how this site looked like. I do not recall how i got your feed and i’m a really absent commenter. Sorry for that, but i’m still here.

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  40. I read every single post here. I use google reader and i didnt even know how this site looked like. I do not recall how i got your feed and i’m a really absent commenter. Sorry for that, but i’m still here.

    Reply

  42. You, Seth Godin, and Doc Searls are the only advertising types I read regularly.  You even beat out Kara Swisher and her Boomtown viral video teasers.

    Feel the love, John.  You are the classic example of pull.

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  44. I like RSS but when I look at the usage pattern of people I know, I think RSS is just to complex still for most people.

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  47. I subscribe to a TON of RSS feeds. RSS is my main source of news. Twitter feed along side the news reader is kind of like the radio in the background… constantly scrolling.

    I see 100% of your headlines. When one interests me, I will read it in my reader (google). Every now and then I will click though on some articles. Like this one.

    Keys to my clicking through:

    A quality article or synopsis with the promise of more quality information. With the hundres of RSS feeds I read, I do not waste time on junk or duplications.

    Something that makes me happy or angry. Usually angry it sadly seems.  Then I will click through and comment on an article.  

    Reply

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