Dwight talks about RSS for marketing, and mentions a couple of things he sees as problems:
I love RSS as much as anyone else, but we don’t do anyone any favors when we refuse to take off the rose-colored sunglasses. Chris Pirillo throws some brickbats at an RSS doubter, but I happen to agree with the doubter on several points:
- You can’t reliably measure exposure via RSS.
- You can’t control how RSS is displayed.
- RSS doesn’t build a user database.
- RSS is difficult to customize – as a response driver – the way email is.
This problem has been discussed before, and I know Derek Scruggs has built at least one prototype of something that can do subscriber tracking. We’re using the same mechanism to power the NewsGator Tips feed, which is customized for each individual user. It’s simple really:
1. Get a user request for the RSS feed, say /rss.xml
2. Redirect the request with a 301 permanent redirect to /rss.xml?user=123456789
There you go. If you assign users an individual ID, you can track them to some extent. You can’t just look at how many times the feed has been retrieved (not relevant), but by looking at all the data in aggregate, you can tell how many users you have subscribed, the date they subscribed, the approximate date they stopped reading, and other useful data. You can tell, with pretty decent accuracy, how many individual people are reading each post.
And if you are lucky enough to know something about an individual subscriber, you can customize the feed just for them. For example, with the NewsGator Tips feed, we trickle out tips one per day, based on the date you subscribed. It’s not hard – you just need a smart server, and your clients need to react correctly to certain HTTP status codes.
Greg Reinacker: “If you assign users an individual ID, you can track them to some extent. You can’t just look at how many times the feed has been retrieved (not relevant), but by looking at all the data in aggregate, you can tell how many users you have subscribed, the date they subscribed, the approximate date they stopped reading, and other useful data. You can tell, with pretty decent accuracy, how many individual people are reading each post. And if you are lucky enough to know something about an individual subscriber, you can customize the feed just for them. For example, with the NewsGator Tips feed, we trickle out tips one per day, based on the date you subscribed. It’s not hard – you just need a smart server, and your clients need to react correctly to certain HTTP status codes.”…[more]
Wow…NewsGator has a Tips feed? I didn’t know that. I just added it to NewsGator, so thanks for pointing that out. :)
For anyone who didn’t know where it is located (as was my case, five minutes ago), just start up the Feed Wizard from the Subscriptions dialog, and it’ll be a choice when you select “NewsGator.com Feeds”.
On a side note, I found it quite ironic that the tip it sent me was how to add feeds via the Feed Wizard, which I had just done in order to add that feed. ;)
Heh…good point. :-) When new users install NewsGator for the first time, the tips feed will be one of the default subscriptions…so the “normal” use case won’t have that irony you mention.
Greg Reinacker’s Marketing by RSS inspires me and others like Dwight and Derek to think about user-tracking for RSS feeds via HTTP Redirects when fetching the feed. One mind-twist seems to be the transfering of User-Ids (as object-ids, numeric values,…[more]
>>> And if you are lucky enough to know something about an individual subscriber, you can customize the feed just for them. <<< Um, MySmartChannels does exactly that.
RSS is a great technology. And the programmers working with it have done great things. I am sure that will continue. But lets not forget one of the reasons RSS is so popular is the privacy factor. I may desire custom feeds based on my userid but not having that is a small price to pay in order to feel like I have retained some of my privacy. There are too many companies and websites abusing private information to justify tracking user habits, this could be done on a voluntary basis.
Your assumptions dictate your answer. If you assume that circulation means non-bounced emails, then you’ve already precluded RSS as a revenue producing delivery mechanism. I think that all email based revenue models are suspect in view of the current spam growth rate. And the latest call for email postage is frightening. So I’d consider refinements of the revenue model….[more]
Fred Wilson wants Cookies in Feed Readers to intelligently serve ads in feeds. Seems to me that Greg Reinacker’s feed redirection trick is a better solution. It works with the existing infrastructure, shares an overcounting problem from duplicate subscriptions in multiple news aggregators, and adds an undercounting problem when subscription lists are shared. All in all, a clear win.
One thing to remember is that ads are not right for everyone. I think the ratio of ads to content will need to be less than 20% by number and word count to prevent mass defection. Most weblogs can only achieve that by holding back posts losing value by eliminating freshness.
The other thing to remember is that paying for clicks rather than impressions will make this all moot. I think the power readers who use news aggregators will be very adept at filtering/ignoring ads. Making pay per click more attractive for advertising buyers….[more]
What about using a link to an html image, or call a script in the html page that the users are being fed?
Thank you for such great information. I am working with a web master to grow my business and your web site is superb with helps for rss. Thanks again for all your hard work.
Deborah Van Barriger
rss does give privacy to the subscriber in the sense that it bypasses e-mail but for marketing purpose, marketers really need to track and know the person that subscribe to their feed and if they are reading it.
let’s see how the technology for rss evolves over time,
Needs to be re-edited or organized.
A lot of blogging and some lines are exceeding to the right column.
What about categorizing the site?
Just yesterday Google and Lycos announced they are beta testing RSS Marketing, RSS eMail and RSS Publishing News in the UK.
RSS is at 8% use now and will soon hit 10%, which is the critical growth point. This should happen around the end of the year.
Lars
Hello Brandon,
Everything is trackable with
http://www.rss-email-autoresponder.com
and this rss autoresponder does
a lot more, it helps inprove your
SE index.
Also, Microsoft is intergrating RSS into Longhorn.
There are a number of RSS autoresponders out there. My
RSS Autoresponder tracks user ids and displays content depending on the date subscribed just like email autoresponders.
It also tracks regular rss feeds regardless of a user id or not. By tracking the number of subscribers I am able to discern how many RSS subscribers you have and how many items where clicked.
Other items I track is the visitor to subscribe rate, the search enginge keywords that convert, the referrers that convert and the click stream of rss visitors.