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Would a big media company lose traffic if it supported RSS?

Not much data on this yet, but RSS guru Dave Winer says he doesn't think so. "I don't think that providing RSS feeds, if you do it right, lowers traffic, in fact I think you can gain traffic....when the reader clicks on a link, they go to your site to read the full article (only if they're interested of course) and your traffic stays even. Of course those pages have ads, so your revenue doesn't decrease. In this view, think of your feeds as inexpensive advertising for your publication. You pay a small amount upfront to get the feed process going, and a tiny bit of money incrementally to pay for the bandwidth your feeds use."

He acknowledges that sites may lose traffic to their home pages, since the feeds basically reproduce the content on the home page. He says he thinks this is more than offset by the increase in traffic to stories from the feeds.

But many sites count on traffic to their home page for a large part of their advertising revenue. So a significant drop in home page traffic could be a problem.

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3 comments about 'Would a big media company lose traffic if it supported RSS?'

There many additional ways to make a feed carry some type of value for the providing brand/site. You can insert links to related stories and/or links back to your site. You might also include a double click call to a rich media banner that could be used to collect email addresses.

Posted by Rafael Cosentino at June 3, 2004 5:04 PM

not if they have links to other, related, stories within their feeds. and, lots of related links on the page those feeds link to. one of the best sites for keeping you clicking is the bbc. instead of making you register or pay for content, every story stays on the net, and is linked to the latest story, so that readers can see how the story developed. bbc doesn't carry ads (but does get millions from a broadcast license fee) but there's no reason others couldn't follow the same model + ads.

Posted by jason brown at June 4, 2004 1:09 PM

Functional Feeds
If I can read the whole story in my feed reader, that is the best. If I read enough to determine a story is interesting and have to click through to a browser window to read it in entirety, that's ok (this is where the feed provider makes money). If the feed provides too little information for me to decide whether the article is interesting without me going to the browser, I consider it broken, and am likely to remove the feed from my reader. Additionally, if my primitive reader can only download the latest posting (these exist) I also consider it broken.

Posted by Dan W at June 6, 2004 10:01 PM

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