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.)
I’m an RSS subscriber who scans your headlines, decides what looks interesting, and clicks through if I see something worthwhile. I usually ignore “RSS is dead” news, as it patently is not, since I’m still using it daily, but you sucked me in this time…
All part of my evil plan
Yup, Google Reader. Think I’m subscribed to about 22 sites, read pretty much everything. Think clickthrough rate is in the order of 0.01% though. Seriously, including this.
I read most of your articles in full-text over RSS, and I depend on the RSS-GReader link to keep up with virtually everything online. If a site doesn’t put full text in the feed, I will generally unsubscribe just because I don’t have time to remember to open everything in tabs and read later. Hope your Reach metric improves; it seems likely that Feedburner isn’t counting correctly. Seriously: 1 in 600 reach? That’s a bit ludicrous for someone of your stature online.
My shadow is greater than my stature apparently!
Google Reader guy
I don’t use a dedicated RSS-reader, just Firefox plus Brief extension. I have Brief set up to only show headlines, so I usually click through to the articles when I think it’s an interesting one.
If it weren’t for RSS, I would probably not visit your site very often.
i read ’em all. but, yeah like others said – no real reason to click through – and requiring a login is tedious.
thank you for all the hard work you put into this blog. keep it up.
You are most welcome
i read ’em all. but, yeah like others said – no real reason to click through – and requiring a login is tedious.
thank you for all the hard work you put into this blog. keep it up.
Avid RSS reader…
I read a lot via RSS. My own blog has (per Feedburner) 2,162 subscribers and a reach of 100. That’s 4.6%. But it’s highly specialized for an obscure profession….
Read them all via RSS, but rarely every click through.
Without RSS I would not be exposed to your content at all. I scan all my feeds through my yahoo every morning.
I read *every* article via RSS. Thanks for continuing to post and share full-feed articles! 🙂
Google Reader
RSS is great medium for a set of consumers, a good tailored signal to noise ratio, being able to scan 100s of sources efficiently in little time, mentally building respect for those who have taken time to put down great insight. Not real-time (although sometimes near), no distracting content or links to links, I believe it’s a beautiful medium for those that wish to consume using it.
i’m reading!
I read your work almost every day.
Read this in google reader!
I can’t say that I read everything you post, but I browse everything you’ve posted since I added your RSS feed. RSS is a great medium if you don’t like being inundated with advertisements…
Read this in google reader!
I am also reading via RSS. Same as most of the rest… Not much commenting, but checking the headlines daily and reading a bunch of articles.
I’m still an avid Google Reader user.
Reader is my workhorse
present and reading
I read your stuff every day in Google Reader and love it. Please don’t stop providing full RSS feeds, and of course keep up the great blogging! 🙂
Well, it looks like you are halfway to reaching your goal of exceeding your reach *grin*. Your posts show up in my RSS reader, and I happily read them – but beyond that I don’t interact with them much because there is no need to. You rarely make posts that require further interaction… because you (happily) provide everything we need in the single post.
keep it up!
Without RSS, there is no way I can stay on top of the mountain of blogs required to keep up with the technologies I use every day. I almost never comment, but nonetheless I’m a reader whale who clicks through links in feeds when they’re interesting and appropriate, who shares a dozen articles every day, and also who will write a scraper to get full-text feeds if the author doesn’t offer them. Excerpts are BS.
From my perspective, you’re doing the right thing all around. Your content is good, you respect your readers enough (and are confident enough in your words) to offer a full-text feed. I wouldn’t be sad to see ads in your feed as long as they don’t break my reader.
Wish there was a way to put ads in the reader in a way that actually worked
I get text ads in a few of my feeds, which don’t seem to break anything. I even get narrow (460px, maybe?) banners in a few, which (again) don’t seem to break anything. One feed even tried to sneak in Flash ads, which caused me to drop it, as that was breaking Google Reader, and writing a feed proxy seemed like more work than it was worth.
Without RSS, there is no way I can stay on top of the mountain of blogs required to keep up with the technologies I use every day. I almost never comment, but nonetheless I’m a reader whale who clicks through links in feeds when they’re interesting and appropriate, who shares a dozen articles every day, and also who will write a scraper to get full-text feeds if the author doesn’t offer them. Excerpts are BS.
From my perspective, you’re doing the right thing all around. Your content is good, you respect your readers enough (and are confident enough in your words) to offer a full-text feed. I wouldn’t be sad to see ads in your feed as long as they don’t break my reader.
Here’s (my) vote (via Reader)! 😉
Reading on G reader.
Reading on G reader.
While I fear for the future of RSS, since its use seems restricted primarily to news junkies and tech geeks, its an incredibly useful technology. Long live RSS.
I read all headlines and some articles and I use NNW.
I read all headlines and some articles and I use NNW.
I recently subscribed in Google Reader, but I seldom click back, either to read the comments or, even rarer, to post one – like now.
Then double thanks!
I recently subscribed in Google Reader, but I seldom click back, either to read the comments or, even rarer, to post one – like now.
RSS here. Life will suck when/if it’s gone.
🙂
I’m reading via RSS!
Hi from a google reader reader
Yeah, right. RSS is dead just like email is dead. In other words, not at all. If a technology serves a purpose, AND that purpose is not being served anywhere else, AND it’s not getting in the way of anything, it’s not going away any time soon. The case is possibly stronger for RSS than email in the sense that email does present a multitude of security problems. RSS is utterly harmless, I believe.
Reading on GReader, but getting more and more content via twitter and gplus to compete with reader feeds.
Thanks for your full feed btw – your definitely gets more of my attention this way!
Pet peeve time.
I’m writing this comment because I found this post through Google Reader. And your reported increase in subscribers is impressive, John. So yes, RSS is still a mechanism by which (very qualified) readers discover new content, however much it may be a limited subset of Internet users.
But (and here’s the pet peeve part) RSS has a utility that extends far past subscriptions. A topical website with zero subscribers to its RSS feed is still benefiting from the existence of that feed.
First, RSS remains the most efficient way of pushing content to multiple data consumers (including search engines) through pinging on publish (or even more efficiently, by using PubSubHubbub). A blog that does not employ XML sitemaps can still see posts appear in Google’s index minutes after publication because when you ping Google Blog Search (or a distributed ping target like Pingomatic that includes it) Google globally indexes that post (i.e. you’re pinging Blog Search but it appears in the main index).
Second, RSS provides – as it has for years – rich structured data to search engines, aggregators and other data consumers. This enables those data consumers to connect dots and return useful information about authors, sources, canonical link targets, topics, dates and more.
Its a pet peeve because the “RSS is dead” meme inevitably focuses on RSS solely as a subscription utility.
(So well-structured RSS is important if one is going to employ it at all, but I’ll talk about that famous dc:creator “jbat” in an upcoming post of my own on author citations.:)
Very good points, thank you.
re : Pet peeve time.
Google removed the sharing functionality built into Reader, and replaced it with a +1 button. Users criticized Google+ in the redesign because it dismantled existing social networks that had formed by disabling sharing and publishing functions. Adding difficulty in transferring social contacts, and highlighting issues around data portability.
RSSOwl 2.1 released July 15, 2011 with new features include Google Reader synchronization support which synchronizes fulltext searches of selected Google Reader and selected RSS feeds. In addition to its full text searches, saved searches, notifications, newsgroups, and filters, you can blog news viewed in RSSOwl with your favorite blogging tool.
http://www.rssowl.org/overview2
I see your RSS feed in my Mailwasher, but mostly I just blow it out because you are in my coffeecup and I look at your column everyday. If for some reason I’m out of town for a few days, then I’ll check the RSS to see what I missed. So to some extent I use both.
My feeds are almost the only access I use to “entertainment” content (not work, not info, just enjoying reading)…
That said I think I’ve posted less then 10 comments over the years…
I frequently read your posts in GR. I don’t think RSS is dead, nor do I think the numbers are true.
Live human interested in your thoughts and insights – but rarely compelled to click through or comment. Always wondered about whether Google Reader somehow captured articles actually read and passed that info back to publishers. Appreciate your full articles in the reader. Makes my exercise of “reading the world” each day faster and simpler. Thank you!
ping
RSS via Google Reader here.
I skim probably 60-70 percent of the articles in my 180+ list of feeds. I do read all the headlines.
A lot of stuff gets cataloged as been written about in my head, and a Google search will find it for me again when I am called upon to remember it.
So, the few ‘interactions’ I’ve had with your content tends to be days or weeks after you publish and appears to be a channel other than RSS.
RSS is alive and well… (and I didn’t even know of your blog the last time you asked the question so I couldn’t have commented then…)
always read, rarely comment