Feeds: The Publishers Enemy?
Some in the blogosphere have speculated that feeds are not a friend of the publisher and the reasons why they believe that feeds are the enemy can be summed up in three bullet points:
- Feeds have a very low sell through rate (at this point in time)
- CPMs are lower in the feed than they are on the site
- Feed analytics aren’t nearly as detailed as web analytics
These things are all true… right now. What I think people forget or choose not to acknowledge is the future and what feeds could and will become.
A good analog to the situation we currently see with feeds and web sites would be that of the web and newspapers 10 years ago.
When the web started to gain traction and more content began to appear on it the newspapers took notice and started to develop web sites. However, they were unsure of how much to give consumers on the web since, you guessed it, the following issues were staring them in the face:
- Web sites had a very low sell through rate
- Ad rates were lower on the web than they were in print
- Web analytics weren’t nearly as detailed as print distribution analytics
The newspapers still pushed forward though in the hopes that web sites would drive people to become print subscribers and we all know how well that worked out and that is to say not well. This is another analog to the current world of feeds in fact.
There are some who think publishing limited content in the feed will drive users to their sites but we at FeedBurner have found that to be untrue just as it was for web sites driving print subscriptions.
Do feeds have a way to go? Sure. Are they changing the way content is consumed for more and more people every day? Yes. That said, I don’t think feeds are any publishers enemy and I don’t think any publisher looking at the long term view would disagree. Feeds are a publishers best friend.
I tend to think of feeds as “advertising” . . . I skim over several dozens of items a day in Google Reader, and middle-click the interesting ones to read further. Special formatting and images and whatnot tend to look less beautiful in feeds than on the web site themselves.
Any time I see a web site that seems vaguely interesting, I see if I can “subscribe” to it. The feed then becomes a method for a web site to stay on my radar. Kind of like having newspaper kiosks on the street: mostly people will gawk at the headlines, but it is a gateway for people to buy one issue directly, which can ultimately convert them to paying subscribers.
-danny
Danny Howard
4 Aug 07 at 4:51 pm