Losing Traffic Through RSS?
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
About 3 months I created myself a Bloglines account. For those of you not aware of bloglines and what you can do with it, in simple terms it's like an online email client (webmail facility) for RSS feeds. If you're not familiar with RSS feeds then here's a quick guide.
Basically all the sites and blogs you visit regularly can be added to your bloglines account (as long as they have an RSS feed) and from one single page you can see when new content is added and read the headlines.
I love it, I check it every morning and read the latest tech news headlines and other info etc from the 20 or so sites I would probably have visited individually through the day.
So, I'm wondering, and realising, and thinking, and pondering whether or not I'm actually visiting my favourite sites as much as I used to, and I'm not. I skim through the headlines and occasionally click through to read more from the full article but I'm not visiting the sites as regularly as I used to. Therefor the sites I'm not visiting as regularly are missing what used to be daily opportunities to catch my eye with other related information and potential sales revenues.
Are they Losing traffic?
Basically all the sites and blogs you visit regularly can be added to your bloglines account (as long as they have an RSS feed) and from one single page you can see when new content is added and read the headlines.
I love it, I check it every morning and read the latest tech news headlines and other info etc from the 20 or so sites I would probably have visited individually through the day.
So, I'm wondering, and realising, and thinking, and pondering whether or not I'm actually visiting my favourite sites as much as I used to, and I'm not. I skim through the headlines and occasionally click through to read more from the full article but I'm not visiting the sites as regularly as I used to. Therefor the sites I'm not visiting as regularly are missing what used to be daily opportunities to catch my eye with other related information and potential sales revenues.
Are they Losing traffic?
posted by Roy Wilding at 12:18 pm 
4 Comments:
The other side of this argument is that RSS users can keep track of far, far more sites than if they had to browse each separately.
I follow probably a couple of hundred websites each day via RSS, and when I notice that one provides regular quality content I tend to give it more of my attention.
Maybe RSS can be viewed as a long-term reputation-builder, rather than a click-me-quick solution?
I think you also have to consider how you deliver your content as well. you need to get your initial message out in the header at the very least, then maybe the interested party clicks through for further content. I can see it being a bad thing in the short term for Adsense sites, which may not be a bad thing.
"click-me-quick", what a great term!
Strangely no one has registered that domain.
The hyphen-less versions are all taken sadly.
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