Media organisations who only offer partial RSS feeds might be interested to look at a couple of posts from 2 websites with different experiences of monetising their feeds. First, Jason Snell of MacWorld:
“RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS, sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the return as ads on web pages.”
“The ads in most sponsored RSS feeds are indeed cheap and lousy. The ads in DF’s [Daring Fireball's] RSS feed are neither. They’re priced at a premium, and have attracted (if I do say so myself) premium sponsors.
“If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.”
Snell’s response: “What works for [Gruber's one-man] kind of site doesn’t necessarily work for our kind.”
It’s also worth noting the tertiary benefits of full RSS feeds. Offering full RSS feeds makes it more likely a developer is going to create something useful out of it (expensive development time for free), bringing more readers and attention to your advertising or, in the case of the BBC (which may have licensing issues holding it back), fulfilling its public service remit.
Do you or your organisation do anything interesting with your RSS feeds? Are they full or partial? I’d love to know.
(Note, OJB uses the <more> tag to to ensure the homepage isn’t dominated by a single post. Unfortunately, this results in partial RSS feeds. Some day I’ll sort this.)
In addition to the usual reading list I give to students on the new MA Online Journalism, I also provide an OPML file of around 50 RSS feeds they should be subscribing to – broadly, 5 feeds each in 10 categories.
I thought I should make it available here, so: here it is.
The idea is that a) they get instant access to up-to-date news and analysis of a range of relevant areas; and b) it introduces them to the concept of RSS, if they don’t already know about it, and how to share OPML files.
It seems a no-brainer that we should be doing this on all courses.
Oh, and if you think there are better feeds, let me know.
Here’s a very useful tool if you come across an article that gives you a whole bunch of RSS feeds you’d like to subscribe to – or, indeed, if you’re writing such a post yourself. [Read more]
There’s a great list of RSS feeds for infographics news over at Nicholas Rapp’s blog, which I’ve belatedly discovered. It’s thoroughly recommended – but copying and pasting them all into your reader is a bit of a chore – so I’ve created an OPML file of them all which you can import in one graceful motion.
Update, 2 days later: Paul is kind enough to let me guest post here (ie I wrote this, not him). It was going well until this post … You can read my climbdown here…
The latest subscriber figures (see table below, and first published in my blog’s newspapers category) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds – and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.
(You can read some of the defences of RSS here and here)
The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.
And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).
Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.
The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK … [Read more]
As part of a group response to the government’sinquiry into the future of local and regional media,Paul Bradshaw looks at the role of local authorities in regional journalism. Blog comments will be submitted to the inquiry as well as the blog posts.
The question of what public sector bodies should be allowed to publish, how that affects local journalism, the local economy, and local democracy, is one of the most difficult to resolve – not least because it involves so many interconnected elements.
The first problem is that any discussion runs the risk of conflating a number of separate but interlinked elements:
local councils and local democracy are not the same thing;
local newspapers and local journalism are also two different things.
Whatever model emerges must recognise that papers are not the only places where public discussion takes place, and print journalists are not the only people holding power to account.
3 weeks ago my class of online journalism students were introduced to the website they were going to be working on: BirminghamRecycled.co.uk – environmental news for Birmingham and the West Midlands.
The site has been built by final year journalism degree student Kasper Sorensen, who studied the online journalism module last year.
In building and running the service Kasper has done a number of clever, networked things I thought I should highlight. They include:
Creating a Delicious network for the site – every journalist in the team has a Delicious account; this gathers together all of the useful webpages that journalists are bookmarking
Kasper sent the whole team an OPML file of subscriptions to RSS feeds of searches for every Midlands area and environmentally related keywords. In other words, journalists could import this into their Google Reader and at a stroke be monitoring any mention of certain key words (e.g. ‘pollution’, ‘recycling’) in Birmingham areas.
The About page has a list of all contributing journalists with individual RSS feeds.
In addition, each author has a link to their own profile page which not only displays their articles but pulls Twitter tweets, Delicious bookmarks and blog posts.
Kasper wanted to explicitly follow a Mashable-style model rather than a traditional news service: he felt an overly formal appearance would undermine his attempts to build a community around the site.
And community is key. When unveiling the site to the journalists Kasper made the following presentation – a wonderful distillation of how journalists need to approach news in a networked world:
This year I’m aiming to blog all of my course materials for online journalism. Yesterday was the first class, so below is the PowerPoint for what I call Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering: using RSS and social media for newsgathering.
RSS feeds, advertising and selling attention
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).
