RSS Feeds Bad for business?

RSS News Syndication is growing at a pretty fast rate. I only recently took a tutorial on how and what is RSS. I'm been reading syndicated news for the past week or so and I only aggregate banking/business/ecommerce news, because frankly, i dont care if a horse ran into the city of chicago, or if there's a typhoon in korea. There's way too much disinformation... The problem is that when I do aggregate news, it's a great advantage to me, because I get to see only what I want to BUT the companie that provide me with the news are making less money when they do allow News Syndication.

For example: I was looking at BusinessTimes.com.my , where they got good banking news, and their site got some ads, from which they probably make tons of money. But what happens when they give out their content for no price to some ad free rss reader. Isn't this a ad revenu killer? Now this is only one company, imagine all of the others that offer rss news. A huge loss of profit, in general terms.

As I said, the good side is that we get to have easy compilation of all the news, but the providers lose money cause we don't see their ads so they make content for no reason.

 

The good part about RSS so far is the majority of its users are Geeks, who will not be clicking on ads anyway. Walk up to a 15 year old teenage girl and ask "Do you know what RSS is?" and she will sort of laugh at you and go "What evar". Soo -- It's not really much to worry about, most people that do RSS feeds will only show a portion of the news/article just to "tease" the user into visiting the actual site, which is a good strategy.

 

Travis, I agree with you on the teasing part. Altho, me, I don't have much time on my hands for news, so sometimes I won't even click because there's so many new titles to read to get a global view of the market. But indeed I do click if there's a teaser that I really like.

And you are kinda right, the 15 year olds are indeed afraid of even looking at the scary little orange icon with several variations ( RSS, XML, FEED , etc) they are like OH NO MY COMPUTER IS GOING TO EXPLODE IF I CLICK. But some are brave and click and see nothing but a bizzar ensemble of colored code, which they don't know what to do with because their grandma didn't teach them to type into google 'Insert_problem_word_here + tutorial' in google.

But what can we do? I guess that at some point, they will mature and click on it and many at some point look for a tutorial.

 

What you could do is make your feed styleized. I have no idea how you do that, because I haven't been able to do it, but it makes it look more like an actual site for those who don't know what it is, and for those who do, it works with a normal RSS reader.

Example:
feeds.feedburner.com/mattmecham/sWKA

 

These RSS feeds are also about creating one-way links back to your website which Google and Yahoo! really like. We've found that we get additional traffic and keyword ranking, which both translate into more revenue, not less.

 

I have heard from many (Shoemoney included) that RSS can give you up to a 30% boost so I implemented it on all my sites and I have seen about a 15% growth.

I have used personalized Google home page for a long time now and that is all RSS feeds. No way I could go back to the regular Google page now

 

Thank you for pointing that out Debare, this thread was to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of RSS.


Also, did you guys hear about OPML, a new format for XML News Syndication that RSS Readers can support?

 

The nice things about feeds are that you are publishing them. So you can simply put as much or as little content as you want into them. Set it to titles only if you don't even want a summary.

Why not write the first section of text that would go into your feed in a more ad like way. Light on details, with some hook. "An amazing them happened. Read more to find out what happened OMG!"

 

Another note, services like YPN allow you to adverise in RSS feeds. So visitors don't even have to go to your site and you can still make money.

 

Adsense is slacking, get with it Google!

*sulks off into a corner*

Good to know, thanks.

 

OPML isn't a feed format. It's a file format which allow you to export numerous feeds as a whole. For instance, you can export all the feeds to which you suscribe from your feed reader. You send this OPML file to someone, he import it in his feed reader, and he got all the feed in one shot.

You can this way share the feeds you suscribe to.

There is a site who allow users to share theirs feed :

Share your OPML

Sorry if it's not clear, I lack vocabulary

 

Thanks for clarifying that for me Monty!

 

It's my pleasure