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 read your blog via RSS John and read the entire post. So life is good here.
I use RSS as my main way to scan and read multiple sites. I would not be reading this post if not for RSS.
For what it’s worth John, I read RSS everyday. However, I tend to read some feeds in bursts. I had not read your’s for a couple of weeks and just started catching up today. Saw this and wanted to let you know of an anecdotal experience.
still reading
read all your posts in reader
Rss forevs
RSS is for reading, Facebook and Twitter feeds are for gazing.
I’ll take RSS any day.
John, the big issue is less your audience and more about the Feedburner metrics. I use Feedburner but I don’t believe the data. There are lies, damn lies and statistics. There is also a second implied assumption in your comment that all readers are created equal – that’s the kind of lame thinking that drove much of the dunderheaded strategic choices that were made during my brief time at Yahoo!; but that’s a story for another time. RSS is alive with the people that really matter.
Best regards,
Ged Carroll
Point.
‘The Search’ changed the way i look at web and my career. Thank you.
But this is my first comment; and i came to this post clicking on your tweet;
Its been a long time i used a reader.
Thanks! I hope the next book will as well
RSS is very much alive for me. I do increasingly find news through Twitter and Facebook. An while there are gems to be found on social networks. It would be a pretty haphazard, a hit-and-miss way of getting all your news.
I love RSS. By consistently hearing from the same person you get a lot better understanding. Much richer.
Viva RSS.
RSS is very much alive for me. I do increasingly find news through Twitter and Facebook. An while there are gems to be found on social networks. It would be a pretty haphazard, a hit-and-miss way of getting all your news.
I love RSS. By consistently hearing from the same person you get a lot better understanding. Much richer.
Viva RSS.
Another reader for your count.
RSS is very much alive for me. I do increasingly find news through Twitter and Facebook. An while there are gems to be found on social networks. It would be a pretty haphazard, a hit-and-miss way of getting all your news.
I love RSS. By consistently hearing from the same person you get a lot better understanding. Much richer.
Viva RSS.
RSS reader
I’m reading!
RSS is the backbone of my Internet usage. Even with an emasculated Google Reader, RSS feed are my primary source of content.
Regards from Mexico
RSS is the backbone of my Internet usage. Even with an emasculated Google Reader, RSS feed are my primary source of content.
Regards from Mexico City 😉
I read regularly via RSS
Yep, I read all the way through many of your posts in RSS.
-Chris
Your blog is lost among my thousands of posts per day in my RSS feed. I don’t read them all the time. Most of the time, I’ll make a “Mark all as read” to have less clutter the next day.
I would read far fewer blogs without rss
I just started reading your blog this month via igoogle via a feed. Not sure if that counts as rss, but I love reading your posts! Keep em coming!
I appreciate your RSS feed, and it helps me stay connected to you. Truth be told, if you weren’t in my feed, I’d forget about you. 🙁
Like mangopants, I believe you should cling to your RSS subscribers. So many would have forgotten about you without this simple piece of technology. Now try to persuade Google that we should be able to add a RSS feed into a circle in Google+…
I spend at least an hour in Google Reader every day. RSS is invaluable to me but it’s still a mystery for my non-tekkie friends or parents.
Rss reader
It’s not about conversations? It’s about the fact you’ve put things on the internet fo-evah?
But really, if it wasn’t for RSS I wouldn’t be able to keep track of what I intended to read.
I wonder if the merge of google Buzz in reader has anything to do with it? Or is it just dormant accounts of people who subscribe one day and ignore it for the rest of time?
RSS!
I read your stuff through RSS, I would guess I “read” about 1 in 3 of yours in particular and click through to most of those. In january I have clicked through to at least 5 of your posts.
I hope that helps!
Google Reader is alive and well for me.
alive and well.
I didn’t read all of the comments here to see if I am being redundant… I only read posts that are entirely published to RSS, and I rarely click through excerpted posts, as there are way too many other great choices (in my daily feeds) to bother with excerpted posts.
I save long posts to Instapaper, and then I share (via Twitter) if the posts are truly excellent. I only click back to a publisher’s site if I feel I am going to learn something from the comments on a certain article. Ads suck. Find another way to monetize your excellent articles 🙂
RSS reader checking in. Can’t go a day without it.
Oh, so that’s what your site looks like!
Read you regularly…via RSS.
Yes
I read every post via Google Reader, and I Tweet the good ones out. You rock. So does RSS. -@ethan
I regard my RSS as my reading backlog, I browse it once a week using iPad based apps such as Flud. It offsets the need to read daily and it makes for a more enjoyable “reading time” where I can scan through much of my curated content at will. Long live RSS!!
What’s the ratio of comments to page views on an average post.
not sure. this one is off the charts, I am sure.
I have all my technology rss feeds set up in my google reader. I browse it every day to see what’s up. I seldom comment, but I read a good number of the day’s feed. It’s too cumbersome to visit each site to catch the headlines and important articles. I find that rss is my way of keeping up with a varieity of tech topics from many sites/writers.
In fact I recently sent a “bug report” to a site to notify them their rss feed wasn’t updating.
Nice shades.
I consistently read your content, although sometimes I have quite the backlog.
I do my best to write infrequently but have failed of late
Sent from my crippled apple device
It’s true that when I post a link to my blog posts in my G+ or Facebook feeds, they usually get more comments than on the very blog they clicked to.
This concerns me in a way – taproot issues
Sent from my crippled apple device
Twitter is my RSS reader.
Hi John… still a loyal RSS reader too. I think it’s an old/young thing (as is regular reading of blogs). Except for my tenure in the industry, my kids wouldn’t have a clue what either RSS or a blog is.
Yeah we are old, but at least we can still roll down a window in a Cuban car Great to hear from you AA!
Sent from my crippled apple device
Another RSS-reader reader declaring myself!
here
OK – yes – I read your crap on RSS – google reader.
I don’t know about all these kinds and their fancy Google Reader but you’ll have to pry NetNewsWire from my cold dead hands… RSS isn’t dead, it just doesn’t monetize for shit.
reading!