If you’re a fan of this site, you’re also probably a fan of RSS – a once-ascendant technology that has been on most everyone’s deathwatch for five or so years. According to Google’s (almost totally outdated) Feedburner service, nearly 450,000 people subscribe to this blog via RSS – although the number of you who actually read my posts is far smaller (according to Feedburner statistics, which I’ve never fully understood).
In any case, from time to time I’ve poked at you poor RSS readers, just to find out if you’re alive. Remember this piece – Is RSS Really Dead? Or this one – Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It!?
In those posts, I asked if my beloved RSS readers were really out there. Turns out, I got tons of comments back – a very high number given the work involved in declaring fealty to the creaky old standard. (It kind of felt like a reshoot of that wonderful final scene in Horton Hears a Who – “Everybody yell real loud, and maybe Google will hear, and not deprecate Feedburner…” But I digress.)
I’ve always kept my RSS feed “full text” – which means the entire post, pictures, words and all, goes out over RSS, and can be picked up by any RSS reader anywhere on the planet. I always have held the belief that it’s more important that my work get distributed than monetized. But not everyone can afford such high minded principles. Many publishers cut their feed short, teasing folks with headlines and a snippet of the story in the hopes that people will click through to the site, where their visit can be properly “monetized” via advertising.
After much thought, I’m going to do the same. But not for the extra clicks and ads. It’s due to the fraud that’s taken over the content space in the Indpendent Web. Untold legions of bad actors use RSS to scrape “real” sites like this one, then wrap them with ads from exchanges to make a quick buck. The rise of programmatic fraud has made this even worse (see It’s Time To Call Out Fraud In The Adtech Ecosystem for more on this). And no, I’m not going to link to examples – but you can Google “Content Scraping” if you want to learn more.
So, consider this an apology. I am very sorry that you have to click a link to get to the content I make here every day. But also consider this a plea – as in, please do click that link at the top. I very much want you to be part of this conversation.
(And if enough of you complain, you know I’ll listen, and figure out some way around this).
UPDATE: I turned full feed back on. Thanks for all the input.