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It's The Feed Stupid
I was sitting with Dick Costolo, the founder and CEO of Feedburner yesterday. He was taking me through my Feedburner stats page. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve got two to three times as many people who read my feed as those who read my blog. And the ratio is going up every day. I’ve put all this time and energy into my blog page with House Ads, Adsense, Blogrolls, etc and it’s a total waste of time and energy. Because by the end of this year, the number of people who actually visit my blog will be less than 10% of my total audience.
So, this means that the smart money is going to go into the feed space. Because that’s where the action is. Forget AdSense. I need contextual ads built right into my feed. Forget Typepad links, I need the links built right into my feed. Same with comments. And the feed needs to be two way. Atom has that capability I am told. So let me comment right in the feed. That’s a hell of lot better than Trackback.
For all the creativity that blogs have unleashed, its just the tip of the iceberg. RSS is a fundamental “good technology” (ie open and extendable) that is going to impact the Internet in the same way that open standards like HTTP, HTML, and MP3 have.
I am sure that many of your have figured this out already. To which I say – Good, what are you doing with RSS? I want to hear about it.
May 28, 2004 in Venture Capital and Technology | Permalink
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Comments
My blog started exhibiting the same sort of thing around January: the number of "hits" (as opposed to actual "page requests" started climbing at a rate that was not explainable until I realized it was the RSS feed. I've got a lot of folks reading the feed.
Which partially explains why my AdSense revenues have dropped dramatically in the same time period.
It'd be interesting if Google were to come out and officially support AdSense ads embedded in RSS feeds.
Posted by: Brian Dear | May 29, 2004 2:43:01 AM
I was just talking to my web designer about this. He wanted to spiff up my site, and I said there was no point. Everyone is moving to feeds and there isn't any point in having a pretty site. It is about the content now.
Posted by: Todd | May 29, 2004 12:52:19 PM
Have you taken into account the fact that every request for your RSS feed does not necessarily represent someone reading it, since most feed readers are set by default to check every hour or so?
Posted by: Bruce | May 29, 2004 4:03:04 PM
good point bruce. i think it is mostly default pings which are creating a sense of hyper growth in the blog feed numbers. i think we need some serious tools to measure how many people are actually subscribing and reading our RSS feeds
Posted by: Om | May 29, 2004 8:32:04 PM
Very important point. One person who has their RSS reader set at every five minutes can be hitting your RSS file over 13,000 times a month. We have people doing that at www.weblogsinc.com and it is *very* confusing. We are working on technology to figure our how many unique readers we have per feed, how often the average person hits the file and which posts are opened.
These issue will be worked out, however the web isn't going away and I think you'll have a 50-50 type deal with RSS readers v. web readers.
In most cases people will look at both (like I do with Fred's blog)--very similar to what happend with email newsletters in fact.
Posted by: Jason McCabe Calacanis | May 29, 2004 9:01:02 PM
If the aggregation software is doing the right thing (and most are) then it will check to see if the feed has been modified before requesting the whole thing. All of these requests will show up in your stats as 304s (not modified) rather than 200s (OK); this will let you differentiate between actual requests and 'just checking for updates' requests.
Posted by: Phil McCluskey | May 29, 2004 11:26:13 PM
I suspect, as others have in the comments here, that some of the high estimates of the size of the RSS space are based on RSS feed fetches, as opposed to actual readers. At Topix we're measuring actual story clicks to determine real usage of our site. While we have twice as many RSS fetches as HTML visits, users reading Topix via RSS account for less than 10% of our actual story clicks.
While Usenet had an efficient flood-fill distribution system, the bandwidth story for RSS is kind of scary. I suspect there are a lot of folks that install an RSS reader, subscribe to a few feeds, and forget about them forever. But their reader software dutifully fetches the feed every hour, forever. I worry that these "zombie" readers will, over time, become a big problem for little blogs that have a huge bandwidth bill for no good reason.
Posted by: Rich Skrenta | May 30, 2004 12:15:51 AM
froup? scoop? feed? rss, email, irc, im, blogs, and boards? p2p and ftp... listservs and webgroups? oh, and html and xml and, and... micropayments, stores, auctions, and ads.
I beg for integration - only for my sanity.
Posted by: compelled | May 30, 2004 2:51:41 PM
It is about the content now.
It has never not been about the content!!
Isn't it pretty easy to count unique daily feed reads? That seems a decent proxy for readership.
Posted by: pb | May 30, 2004 8:15:29 PM
That's a great point, but could be a little different if aggregators like Jyte (www.jyte.com) become popular. Jyte has a built-in browser, so I'm reading this (and commenting) in the page the way you designed it, with all your Google ads and Blogrolls. I think it's the merger of the tracking and ad-serving interests of publishers with the ease-of-use interests of readers.
Posted by: sarah gilbert | May 31, 2004 4:56:07 PM
What am I doing with a feed? At the moment I am redoing a friend's site using Drupal. Allows me to explore CMS, blogging and RSS, but once up and running under http://www.simonskloof.com (probably before end of the month), it will allow him to update his own content, create forae to attract repeat visitors, and the feed will allow others to stay in touch with what's happening on the farm. Before you start salivating, it's in South Africa, so not your average weekend trip. :)
Posted by: Helmar Rudolph | Jun 10, 2004 8:41:26 AM
The black lists not the correct approach, is necessary to create the centralized system for struggle with spam and to do blogs, closed for the not registered users.
Posted by: strippers | Jul 29, 2004 3:02:58 AM
can i display adsense in a page where content comes from a rss feed? because rss feed is not my original content will google allow this. The page has my original content too. pls help
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