Why I'm starting to turn off RSS feeds....

Thursday, February 28. 2008

Why I'm starting to turn off RSS feeds....

....I am getting increasingly fed up with those blogs that are pumping graphics through my RSS reader. I don't want them, its wasting my page real estate - I like line items like email so I can scan them quickly. Yes, I can go into my settings and change it, but its wasting my time

(Clarification - I mean the thumbnail graphics that appear in the list of headlines on the RSS reader aggregation page - see picture below)

Thumbnail in my "RSS email" stream - Grrr!

These are fairly recent, in the past graphics in a blog didn't show up, but its clearly a new "value add" - I don't think its my reader (MyYahoo) as lots of the feeds don't have a "show image" option, even though they have in-blog graphics, so clearly its an upstream thing.

So, I've started to turn off my "marginal" blogs who use this...next step is bigger volume ones

You know who you are.........................

(Update - some good points re mobile feed from Ian Delaney in the comments, and I agree with him - but thats different to what I'm on about, there its trying to reproduce the actual graphics in the blog post)

Posted by Alan Patrick in Blogging & Blogs at 23:22 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

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I feel partly responsible for this, because I'm always inclined to stick in a lively graphic to make text-y post look nicer. My background in magazines is to blame, I suppose.

Basically, though, you need to sort out your broadband or get the kids off bittorrent for a while.

Graphics and probably Flash and movies are going to move into RSS and it's great.

So there.

#1 Ian Delaney (Homepage) on 2008-02-29 00:10 (Reply)

This is a much bigger issue when you factor in people looking at feeds on mobile. Not so much in terms of download time / bandwidth but clash with usability / accessibility / screen size.

Umm, didn't you post that graph of social network unique users / time spent just this week?

#2 Deirdre Molloy (Homepage) on 2008-02-29 00:26 (Reply)

That's because mobile internet is still rubbish. The people trying to push it are in a dream world.

However, city-wide, free wifi isn't far off. We'll follow the US on that, because there are ad-models that can be put on top of it.

Isn't the mobile usability thing what CSS is all about? (and why it was invented). And every curent website in the world uses CSS now.

Yes, we need a revision that can re-encode pages for mobile that goes beyond reducing it all to text. But that's not a mass-market priority, at the same time.

#3 Ian Delaney (Homepage) on 2008-02-29 00:43 (Reply)

@Deirdre...hmm..had a look at my reader (MyYahoo), it doesn't log Broadstuff as being an image publisher - did you get a graph thumbnail from me?

PS I meant graphs in the RSS headline reader - so when you look down the list in your feed reader, instead of lots of nice email like headings you get thumbnails

#4 alan p on 2008-02-29 00:52 (Reply)

put a pic up now to show you....I like a nice long scroll of email-like headings

#5 alan p on 2008-02-29 01:03 (Reply)

oooh - that's different, then.

#6 Ian Delaney (Homepage) on 2008-02-29 01:16 (Reply)

The bigger issue IMHO is advertising images in RSS. Ad serving platforms today are monolithic and do not support publishers.

Using tools like adify,openx or others is great for website publishing. You get your IAB advert place the javascript code on the site and then record the pageviews etc.

But more and more readers prefer to read blogs posts via RSS and do not want the ads.

This is a real chicken and egg problem. Publishers need advertisers but also need readers. Without advertisers the site cannot afford to publish etc. So there are RSS advertising solutions - feedburner etc.but these are not from the same ad servers as mentioned before.

Right now Google (after the DoubleClick acquisition) appears to be the only provider offering wweb, rss, richmedia, video and mobile advertising and management. It's not perfect but that is where they are going. Advertise once display everywhere.

This is great fro publishers as the reader can choose where/how they wish to consume the content - web, RSS, mobile, video etc.

So the issue of images in RSS will become more prevelant. In the Freeconomics promoted by Kelly,Carr and Anderson this is inevitable.

One option may be to offer readers a subscription to ad free content.

Failing that I am sure Ad Block would of course kill the ads.

Bottom-line is good content can now be consumed in multiple ways, times and locations. Publishers need to monetise all of these channels.

But I agree superfluous images in feeds is annoying.

#7 Sam Sethi on 2008-02-29 10:58 (Reply)

@ Sam...yes, the Feedburner?ad issue came up last year, I blogged about it here:

http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/252-Feedburner-to-Serve-Mo-Ads-O-Joy.html

(if you recall I said I'd turn off any blog that pumped Ads through my RSS - haven't seen one yet though)

#8 alan p on 2008-02-29 16:47 (Reply)

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