News
Toning Back RSS, Hopefully Just for Awhile
When we started offering full RSS feeds, we did so because we had great partners at FeedBurner. Over the past several months, FeedBurner has been acquired and integrated into Google. We’ve migrated all our services over… but, there is a problem.
With the decline in the economy, Google has really done a number on RSS feed advertising rates… far worse than on any level that we expected. Plus, our readership tends to avoid RSS advertising to begin with (i.e. you don’t click on ads in general). So, we’re having to draw a line somewhere.
Until Google can improve the RSS ad market, or until someone else comes along… we’re going to have to end running full articles in RSS. We hope that this is only temporary. Really, we do. For well over a year we ran RSS feeds with a significant operating loss, versus running RSS summaries. In this economy, we can’t do that, especially with no bright outlook on the RSS ad market.
I know this is going to make some people upset, and for that, I apologize. We’re going to make sure our article summaries in RSS are more than enough to give you the news that you need to know, and click through for the full in-depth analysis that you’ve come to expect.
Christopher,
Yes, the recession has affected advertising rates and all web publishers are suffering.
However, I do not believe that going to partial feeds will increase your revenue..
The likely result is that many of the readers of your feeds will unsubscribe. RSS users represent your most technically savvy readers and include many bloggers and journalists, people who subscribe to hundreds of feeds to keep up with the industry and find sources for news and blog items. They are the folks most likely to link to you and give you “Google Juice”. Power users of feeds won’t click through to your sites, they’ll just switch to your completion who do offer full feeds.
Besides if feed users aren’t clicking feed ads, why would they click on ads on your sites? In my experience, it is random Google visitors who click ads, not regular readers, which is why back links are important.
Also please see: http://techdirt.com/articles/20070813/014338.shtml for more on the partial/full debate.
Dennis – wapreview.com
Dennis, thanks for the insight, we are pretty familiar with the debate.
We have a very established viewership, and we tend to break news before the rest of the guys. If folks want to read the news first, they’ll click through and see it here.
Of course, offering full RSS feeds does increase page views. But, we’ve found for that to be a marginal impact that tends to fade over time.
I would call your link to TechDirt a partial part of the debate, because as commenters over there have pointed out… page views are only half the battle.
In this economy, we have to focus on profits, not page views. And, we can do that best by breaking news first, so that there is no competition to compete with.
And, finally, I meant what I said in the original post. This hopefully will only be a temporary move, and enough publishers will show Google that we won’t sit idly by while the RSS feed market tanks. They need to step up and fix the marketplace by implementing ad rate thresholds, or kick off under-performing ads (much like they do on AdSense for Web).
P.S. We have seen a revenue spike since making this change. It’s not really shaking things up, but it has helped compensate for the hemorrhage-grade drop in ad rates month-over-month.