Comments on: Is RSS dead? Newspaper subscriber numbers now and 18 months ago compared

By: Freelance Unbound» Blog Archive » Blogging lessons from last year’s Google Analytics

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:22:12 +0000

[...] also some feed reader traffic, which means it still isn’t dead as a means of distribution, as some suggest it will be, but then I’m dealing with journalists, who are probably the last holdouts on [...]

By: andy

andy — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 16:12:27 +0000

I think, not coincidentally, you have some papers that are losing subscribers globally. It would've been interesting to see RSS feeds where their personal web appeal has grown in that time period, I can't name many but The Huffington Post comes to mind.

By: RSS is Dead Hubbub « BOINK

RSS is Dead Hubbub « BOINK — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 22:40:07 +0000

[...] Is RSS dead? Newspaper subscriber numbers now and 18 months ago compared [...]

By: W.I.P. (Work In Progress) » Liens du jour #41

W.I.P. (Work In Progress) » Liens du jour #41 — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:58:30 +0000

[...] flux RSS des journaux sont-ils morts? (blog de Malcom [...]

By: Brad Down

Brad Down — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 22:42:46 +0000

With respect RSS feed are one of the most useful technologies on the web, unfortunately many top level publishers just never got the strength of it and continued to withhold full feeds. This has led to users just not bothering or just not getting the point. If you are a headline scanner like me then they are still the best way to digest a lot of news quickly but RSS reader technology just hasn't quite given the average user enough value to persist with. RSS technology will continue to exist for years but I predict a softening of the usage and most likely the de prioritisation of integration on publisher sites.

By: Brendan Cooper

Brendan Cooper — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:14:00 +0000

Paper.li is good but I'm finding people are only interested in it when they're in it, if you see what I mean! It's being extended to Facebook and Twitter searches too, so let's see what happens there. My understanding of the 'home' page on Google Reader was that it attempted to lay things out like a newspaper? Alternatively you could go for something like Netvibes which gives you that sort of layout control. But isn't this what apps do now? Instead of the 'free' RSS with a reader, publishers are pushing their apps to consumers who then don't need to worry about volume because it's been pre-edited, and they don't have to learn a new technique like subscribing to or reading RSS. So apps are less integrated but do remove some of these barriers. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out in 2011.

By: Jeremy Head

Jeremy Head — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:01:30 +0000

Thought provoking stuff. I recently revamped my RSS reader after leaving it unloved for months because I was enjoying the excitment of links shared on twitter. But I got to thinking... how can I limit myself to what a bunch of other people see as 'important'?
I think if you have a specific sector/topic interest you are potentially really missing out on stuff by just relying on twitter.
It would make an interesting piece of research - does following the right people on twitter offer me as much (or more) as using my Google reader/Netvibes page does?

By: Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:51:34 +0000

I'm not sure the data is accurate enough to be considered representative of a trend…

that said there is a distinct gap between the RSS "browsers" and the RSS "subscribers — if you're just looking for a way to get notification of new stuff then notifications in a space you spend more time in (Twitter, FB, collected and then pinged to you) makes sense. Note that all that sort of stuff is reliant on RSS further up the chain.

'Direct' RSS subbing may be on the wain, but reading things pumped by it (add in the FB or Twitter streams that are little more that RSS feeds piped to platform) probably hasn't.

Google Reader is hub for me of tons of search feeds that I may well be the only subscriber to.

(I mused some time ago on this http://www.jonbounds.co.uk/blog/901/just-good-enough-and-why-rss-readers-might-be-skip-tech/ )

By: Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:43:14 +0000

Re the Paper.li thing — Flipboard or Reeder for the iPad do just that, and Reeder has a desktop version in the offing.

By: Malcolm Coles

Malcolm Coles — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:40:14 +0000

Sullivan: thanks, useful link.

Brendan: One of the problems with RSS is sorting through the updates. Like many people, I periodically mark everything as read because I can't distinguish, and don't have time to work out, the really important stuff from the rest.

I quite like that paper.li thing that uses Twitter to show stories that have been passed around on Twitter - but lays them out like a newspaper site's homepage to try and give different things different weights. If someone could build an RSS reader that did something similar, that would be cool ...