Poor Advice From FeedBurner
By Rob Safuto on Jun 8, 2007 in RSS, Social Media | Tags: Feedburner , FOOA , RSS
Yesterday at the Future of Online Advertising Conference Brent Hill of FeedBurner made a seemingly innocuous comment that I really disagree with.
Brent stated that RSS wasn’t really for infrequent publishers. He indicated that RSS was more suited to frequent publishers. I disagree with his first assertion.
Offering RSS is good for any publisher for a variety of reasons. But RSS is especially valuable to infrequent publishers. Think about it for a minute.
Those who publish frequently, like daily newspapers and lots of blogs, have people who come to the website knowing that there is something new every day. Those who publish every so often don’t get the same types of visitors.
Do you like to ‘go fishing’ on a website to find something new? I bet that your answer is, “No.”
So if I subscribe to the feed of a publisher who delivers content that I want but not on a regular basis, I know that I won’t miss anything important.
So my message to publishers of information is simple. You need RSS even more if your updates are less frequent. This ‘really simple’ technology can help you retain a connection with those who care about what’s going on with your business.
[tags]Social Media, RSS, FeedBurner, FOOA[/tags]
Kevin Keating | Jun 8, 2007 | Reply
I interpreted his statement to mean that RSS *advertising* is not a good idea for infrequent publishers, which changes things a little, but I think your point remains valid.
RSS is a solution for sites that update infrequently as well as ones that update all the time. It provides different value to readers of each type.
For infrequently updated sites: Eliminates “fishing” for new content.
For regular updaters: Saves the readers a ton of time typing in URLs.
In this day in age there really is no good reason not to syndicate your content and provide customized feeds for everything from search results to specific product categories to blog comments. Whether or not advertising in feeds is the question that has yet to really be answered.
Rob Safuto | Jun 8, 2007 | Reply
If he did mean that it was the advertising in the RSS that didn’t make sense for infrequent publishers then I could not argue with that. It seemed to me that at the point the comment was made we were still in the “why use RSS” part of the talk.