This Way App

American Demographics,  Sept 1, 2004  by Noah Rubin Brier

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

More and more publishers are jumping on board every day. In July, The Wall Street Journal added RSS feeds and The New York Times upped its feed count to 27, thereby allowing users interested in specific sections to receive headlines for just those sections. They also added a feed of the most e-mailed articles, allowing users to read only those articles which others found interesting enough to send to their friends or colleagues. For the Times, RSS drives a million page views a month. The news organization's feeds come with the headline and a one-line abstract. These feeds are also completely ad-free, although when users click through to read the full story, they get the normal site advertising. Catherine Levine, vice president, product, business development and strategy for New York Times Digital, doesn't see adding advertising to RSS any time soon. "If it turns out to be a viable advertising medium we would certainly consider it," Levine states. "Our goal with RSS is to distribute the headlines; it's really a distribution point for us."

One of the problems with distributing this way, is that at this point, quantifying usage for RSS is a very difficult undertaking. Because aggregators tend to check for updates from feeds at time intervals, e.g., they'll check a feed every half hour, a hit doesn't necessarily mean a view. "Probably the biggest business challenge of RSS is the lack of concrete knowledge about usage. I have a sense of how much traffic I see from the feed and it's risen every month this year and it's growing around the company. However, I can't tell whether that [growth] comes from 100,000 people, 50,000 people or a really active 10,000," explains John Roberts, associate vice president, product development for CNET News.com. CNET's tech savvy News.com is presumed to be one of the more popular RSS feeds. News.com has seen huge increases in RSS traffic in the past few months, jumping to over 5.4 million requests during a week in June from 4.2 million requests in a week in March. While that number doesn't necessarily reflect the total number of users of the News.com RSS, it certainly indicates the growth in popularity of the feed.

Chicago-based FeedBurner is trying to fill that quantitative hole in the market by giving RSS publishers some hard data. "If publishers run their feed through us, we track all the clicks that come through the feed and report that to them. We can provide detailed statistics tracking the usage of your feed: How many readers you have, when it's being accessed, what they're clicking, etcetera," says Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner. This lack of reliable usage data is a sure sign that RSS is still in its infancy. While it is a potentially powerful tool, most experts believe the technology is within 12 to 36 months of moving past it's early adopter phase to wider consumer use.

"Right now, the audience [for RSS] is bloggers and aggregators as opposed to 'regular Joes.' But I think that's beginning to change as people know more about it and get a better sense of it," explains Eric Easter, senior manager, communications for WashingtonPost.com. "Right now, the page views are more likely to come through a blog, by people linking through to The Washington Post."