March 20, 2007
It’s All About the Benjamins
A comment from “callmebob” on my post about Seeking Alpha’s Great Leap Backwards led me to this post by Michael Eisenberg, Five Reasons Full RSS Feeds Should Come to an End. Here’s my summary of and response to Eisenberg’s post:
1) “You can’t post a comment in your feed reader so ‘conversation’ is limited.” Nonsense. If I want to post a comment to something I read in my feed reader, I’ll just click through and comment.
2) “You can’t accurately or reliably measure your readership with feeds.” Nonsense. Feedburner’s stats are first-rate. How many publishers have Seeking Alpha’s problem of having 6,500 feeds (which is stupid in the first place) to track? What Eisenberg really wants is to “bring people back to your site so you can measure their interaction on a granular level” because…
3) It’s All About the Benjamins.
“When a reader signs up on email, you have there [sic] 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.”
Ka-ching! There’s the money shot. Of course RSS is a “monetizable channel” - why does Eisenberg say it isn’t?
4) Some waffling about websites being “dynamic organisms” and the “evolution of content,” but really… It’s All About the Benjamins.
5) “Readers want headlines only.” Nonsense. I can choose to read headlines, summaries, or full-text posts in my reader, and if you don’t offer me a choice for full-text posts, you’re going to piss me off and lose me as a reader.
I am not enamored of guys who want to get my email or measure my “interactions” at a “granular level” in order to better target an ad to “monetize” me. What do you guys think?
March 20th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I agree with all your points. Let me at the content in the way that I want to get it. The content should be the draw, not the fact that its read (initially) in a feed reader or on a web page.
March 20th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I’m not even sure if it’s all about the #3: Seeking Alpha usually goes pretty light on the ads, very little Adsense interruption if any, and I can’t image that they depend on Motley Fool ad clickthroughs or whatever for big revenue. So losing some pageviews can’t be that big of a deal from an ad perspective.
Plus, you can monetize Feedburner feeds, and I assume the rates for RSS ads will only go up as more people move from email to RSS. So it seems like having full RSS and losing some pageviews should only result in a slight net loss of ad revenue, if any.
Is the claim here not about ads, then, but that their brand suffers somehow because with full RSS people don’t click over and see their logo etc.?
“As Daily Candy and other email businesses have proven, good old email is a monetizable channel. RSS is not.” Now this suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of their audience. I can’t remember the last time I was monetized via email - I usually tap delete at the first whiff of marketing. But I’m far more forgiving of RSS, and will even knowingly clickthrough to some product or other. It’s probably because when all formatting is stripped out, every feed looks the same and looks equally credible or something.
Anyway, thanks for the info on this. Bottom line:
Anti-full-RSS people are Luddites.
March 20th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Soren & Jared: Thanks for your comments. What ticks me off about Eisenberg’s post is its dishonesty.
Don’t try to feed me (no pun intended!) a bunch of crap and buzzwords about why you’re opposed to full-text feeds: “interactivity,” “evolving content,” “improving the product,” c’mon.
He should just be honest and say we can’t make an easy buck off readers of full-text feeds.
March 20th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
go chairman
March 20th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
I would think that as a blog writer, you’d want to set yourself apart from the billions of other blog writers. To do so, you’d have write well, write about something people are interested in, and give them FULL access to your article.
I think giving the people what they want is a good marketing tactic, it builds reader loyalty (a core of 12 readers). If you want to make $ at it, offer them something that can’t be translated into RSS so they visit the site.
My 2 cents.
March 20th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Tom: Yeah, I think that blog writers are the new syndicated columnists, except now they don’t need to be bundled together to sell like in the old days. You can subscribe to dozens of different feeds and assemble your own “newspaper.”
March 22nd, 2007 at 12:09 am
Speaking of this, why don’t some of your images show up in the RSS feed? Is this a decision by you or a technical issue?
March 22nd, 2007 at 1:23 am
Chud: I think its a technical issue. When his feed is first published the images don’t show up but later they do.
March 22nd, 2007 at 1:28 am
I want to add something to this arguement based on first hand knowledge of the music biz. It used to be that music companies made a lot of money selling CD’s and all the other packaged crap. Now they’re all freaking because of CD swaping, MP3 downloading, etc.
The underground music scene thrives on “illegal copying” because it gets the bands songs out and that’s free marketing. The way those bands make money is by playing gigs. The more people who have your music (whether legal or otherwise), and like it, will probably show up at your next gig.
That’s how it worked in my old band, until our keyboardist died in a bizarre gardening accident (j/k).
March 22nd, 2007 at 7:49 am
chud: I wish I knew why the images don’t show … it’s a big problem and any technical help anyone can offer is much appreciated.
Tom: Trader Mike says they show up later because you’ve visited the site and cached the images so they show up when you revisit the feed.
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:12 am
Images from the Kirk Report’s feed show up somehow.
As far as, “You can’t post a comment in your feed reader so ‘conversation’ is limited,”–I think there are a lot of comments posted here that are derivatives of feeds.
And for the rest of it, if direct site traffic is what you want, have fulfilling feeds that readers want to click through to. I see most of mine, including a Seeking Alpha and this one, on my personalized Google Homepage, which I usually leave open in a tab 24hrs a day just so I can catch these updates.
March 22nd, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Deen: Images from everybody’s feeds show up somehow, but mine mysteriously don’t.
Yeah, almost all of Eisenberg’s arguments were nonsense, including the comment one.
March 23rd, 2007 at 4:46 am
[…] I guess it’s the eternal debate, full feed RSS vs partial or headline only feeds. I’ve started thinking about this now that I’m a wildly successful blogger with at least 3 or 4 regular readers. Recently Seeking Alpha, a big finance blog, decided to switch from full to partial feeds, with ensuing hubub. His post enumerates a lot of the reasons people give for switching to partial feeds. […]