Richard BF

Today I stumbled across one of Dave Winer’s RSS posts titled Would a big media company lose traffic if they supported RSS?. As regular readers know, I’m not a big fan of the idea that big media RSS is “little almost useful teaser bits of random stuff which have been selected by the publisher from their bigger stash of actually useful stuff”, so while I can see Dave’s point as a stop gap measure, and appreciate his post is all about evangelising RSS, the real problem still isn’t being solved, the availability of and access to content (which I promise I won’t reiterate yet again 🙂 ). From Dave’s post:

I assume you’d publish links to your articles with brief descriptions, in your RSS feeds. So when the reader clicks on a link, they go to your site to read the full article […] and your traffic stays even. Of course those pages have ads, so your revenue doesn’t decrease.

Even uber-Microsoft blogger Scoble isn’t a fan of crippled feeds, and to say that traffic stays even is a bit of a misnomer, as typically you’d see two or even three pages of content with several ads per page for each news item you read on a web site (which is ~200-900% more ads than coming in from a feed). Replacing this with a feed will definitely reduce traffic, that’s sort of the point isn’t it? Remove the web site embellishments, show the raw content (or an almost useful part of it) in a feed, reduce traffic yet increase content discovery and value. If this wasn’t the case, then people wouldn’t be starting to talk about putting ads in feeds to protect their revenue.

Another argument goes that increased (or viral) traffic from weblog referrals could offset the reduction in traffic, but that’s a weblog effect, which people often forget is independent of RSS or Atom.

This all seems a bit defeatist to me, to invent this great syndication technology (RSS, Atom etc.), then have much of it’s value crushed by media companies perhaps too scared or ingrained to question their own outdated business models. It’s the same problem with p2p file sharing and the big record companies, the only real bipartisan step forward is to change the business model to embrace and take advantage of the technology.

People want music (and big media content), and they don’t mind paying for it to arrive in a way that suits them. Seems pretty simple to me.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)