A few years ago you could argue that RSS feeds and blogs were synonymous – that’s not so much the case now, with podcasts, watchlists, commercial publishers, other peer-produced content and rich media. People don’t realize it’s rss feeds powering this dynamic information.
Full or Partial Feeds?
– Feed subscriptions to full content feeds outpace subscriptions to partial content feed for the same source by up to 10x.
BUT
– Feed subscriptions with only partial feeds grow just as quickly as subscriptions to sites with only full feeds
AND
– experiments in decreasing the amount of content in the feed to NOT statistically improve clicks back to teh site (title only)
SO
– Content providers can choose to distribute more or less content but the feed may be all that a consumer ever sees.
Complexity breeds consolidation, simplicity doesn’t
– 2004 – Couple hundred clients pulling feeds
“My Yahoo will eliminate these other things”
“Desktop readers will go away – it will all be web based”
“soon there will only be two or three of these”
– 2005 – Thousand Clients
“Google will jum in here”
“soon there will only be two or three of these”
– 2006 – serveral thousand clients
– “when IE 7 comes out all these other things will go away”
– “It will all be personalized Ajax Home Pages with filters and aggregation”
“soon there will only be two or three of these”
Subscription without recognition
The Feed is Your face – more people will interact with you through your feed, not your web site.
Have content, will travel – you can’t be control how your content is going to be redistributed.
Feedburner allows you to attach “beacon gifts” to your subscriptions so you can get an idea of how many people are viewing your feed.
Oren Sreebny 