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Is RSS really so obscure as the site suggests? Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed. Apparently YouTube content creators receive more

Is RSS really so obscure as the site suggests? Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed. Apparently YouTube content creators receive more money if they have more subscribers, but I don't subscribe and simply use the RSS feed; it's easier. Perhaps YouTube also factors in the number of RSS requæsts they receive.

kevincox 6y ago
IIUC YouTube compensation is based entirely off the number of ads watched/clicked through on your videos. (Saving special one-off contracts that YouTube may offer)
- devlopr 6y ago
  In order to reach a level where youtube would compensate a user you need to reach 1,000 subscribers. If everyone used rss feeds new creators would never get paid.
diegocg 6y ago
Yeah, RSS is used pervasively. Despite not being a mainstream technology in the way people expected it to be, it's still alive because there is just no replacement.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  Its still alive because most blog software generates one by default. I found out my blog has rss and I didn't even know
spians 6y ago
As a maintainer of an RSS reader app which has its own inventory for suggested feeds, one of the uphill battles is sudden removal of RSS support from various sites. I have a list of feeds which are updated once a month and everytime some sites (both niche and big ones) drop RSS support (Reuters and YouTube removing option to export subscriptions as OPML are major blows in last few months). The reason for these removals is also never given. If you look at those sites now, you'd feel RSS support never existed and nobody used them. So the reason for removal could be anyone's guess. Perhaps RSS icon didn't look good with other social media icons on home page, server serving the RSS feed shut down and no one bothered to check, forgot to add RSS option in new design/refactor or some PM didn't find RSS feed engaging enough and actively killed it.
- asveikau 6y ago
  Perhaps people working for these publishers forget about it, maybe there are bugs or small maintenance issues, and they opt to remove support rather than fix it or monitor it for issues.
- loup-vaillant 6y ago
  > Perhaps RSS icon didn't look good with other social media icons on home page If web browsers didn't stop supporting RSS, that icon would not be needed in the first place. We used to have a standard HTML header to advertise the presence of RSS feeds, and the RSS icon was displayed by the browser, next to the URL bar, always at the same place, accessible by everyone including Grandma™.
nicbou 6y ago
I suspect that it's only there because WordPress includes it.
- jacurtis 6y ago
  The fact that Wordpress adds it automatically is a huge win because half or more of all websites are Wordpress. So there are a lot of content creators that don't even know what RSS is and yet you are able to subscribe to them because Wordpress automatically provides a full-text RSS feed for every Wordpress blog. I built my personal blog on a static site generator (Gridsome) and had to add RSS to my site intentionally. Luckily there is a plugin that provides this functionality easily now, but you still have to know about RSS, decide to offer it, and then install the plugin and configure it to compile your RSS feed with each site build. So it is something the developer or maintainer of the site has to think about (at least initially, now that it is configured it updates automatically). I am not a huge fan of Wordpress, but I am grateful that they continue to offer it "automatically" for all Wordpress sites. This means that I am able to subscribe in my feed reader for small sites that might not even think about RSS.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    Same. I had to add my own RSS feed, and didn't do it until I needed it to crawl my own content. Even then, I won't waste screen space with an RSS icon.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Yeah, just looking at my RSS list, most of them I discovered from just checking the usual /rss endpoints that are completely unadvertised on the website where you see in the XML it's generated by Wordrpress. I have no doubt that it's the only reason most feeds exist. Any RSS reader really needs to be able to crawl websites to create its own feed as only consuming websites that support RSS is a pretty weak prospect.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    None of the RSS that I follow are from blogs, however. Most of it is from webcomics that I follow, YouTube channels, and media aggregator websites that inform me whenever a new episode is out of a television series I follow. All of these websites surely added it themselves deliberately.
joe-collins 6y ago
This may say more about paid conversions than anything else, but Ars Technica's main feed, with truncated article previews, currently has 470k subscribers on Feedly. Their full-article feeds, available as part of their paid subscription, were estimated at only a few hundred users, when they briefly broke a few years back. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1371767 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1371767
- Valord 6y ago
  I pay Ars firstly for the full article RSS feed and second help support them.
- kevindong 6y ago
  > Ars Technica's main feed, with truncated article previews, currently has 470k subscribers on Feedly But how many of them are actually using their feed? You reminded me that I signed up for a Feedly account years ago right after Google shut down their RSS product. I just checked and indeed I am subscribed to Ars, among a dozen other feeds.

kevincox 6y ago

IIUC YouTube compensation is based entirely off the number of ads watched/clicked through on your videos. (Saving special one-off contracts that YouTube may offer)

devlopr 6y ago
In order to reach a level where youtube would compensate a user you need to reach 1,000 subscribers. If everyone used rss feeds new creators would never get paid.

diegocg 6y ago

Yeah, RSS is used pervasively. Despite not being a mainstream technology in the way people expected it to be, it's still alive because there is just no replacement.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
Its still alive because most blog software generates one by default. I found out my blog has rss and I didn't even know

spians 6y ago

As a maintainer of an RSS reader app which has its own inventory for suggested feeds, one of the uphill battles is sudden removal of RSS support from various sites. I have a list of feeds which are updated once a month and everytime some sites (both niche and big ones) drop RSS support (Reuters and YouTube removing option to export subscriptions as OPML are major blows in last few months). The reason for these removals is also never given. If you look at those sites now, you'd feel RSS support never existed and nobody used them. So the reason for removal could be anyone's guess. Perhaps RSS icon didn't look good with other social media icons on home page, server serving the RSS feed shut down and no one bothered to check, forgot to add RSS option in new design/refactor or some PM didn't find RSS feed engaging enough and actively killed it.

asveikau 6y ago
Perhaps people working for these publishers forget about it, maybe there are bugs or small maintenance issues, and they opt to remove support rather than fix it or monitor it for issues.
loup-vaillant 6y ago
> Perhaps RSS icon didn't look good with other social media icons on home page If web browsers didn't stop supporting RSS, that icon would not be needed in the first place. We used to have a standard HTML header to advertise the presence of RSS feeds, and the RSS icon was displayed by the browser, next to the URL bar, always at the same place, accessible by everyone including Grandma™.

nicbou 6y ago

I suspect that it's only there because WordPress includes it.

jacurtis 6y ago
The fact that Wordpress adds it automatically is a huge win because half or more of all websites are Wordpress. So there are a lot of content creators that don't even know what RSS is and yet you are able to subscribe to them because Wordpress automatically provides a full-text RSS feed for every Wordpress blog. I built my personal blog on a static site generator (Gridsome) and had to add RSS to my site intentionally. Luckily there is a plugin that provides this functionality easily now, but you still have to know about RSS, decide to offer it, and then install the plugin and configure it to compile your RSS feed with each site build. So it is something the developer or maintainer of the site has to think about (at least initially, now that it is configured it updates automatically). I am not a huge fan of Wordpress, but I am grateful that they continue to offer it "automatically" for all Wordpress sites. This means that I am able to subscribe in my feed reader for small sites that might not even think about RSS.
- nicbou 6y ago
  Same. I had to add my own RSS feed, and didn't do it until I needed it to crawl my own content. Even then, I won't waste screen space with an RSS icon.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Yeah, just looking at my RSS list, most of them I discovered from just checking the usual /rss endpoints that are completely unadvertised on the website where you see in the XML it's generated by Wordrpress. I have no doubt that it's the only reason most feeds exist. Any RSS reader really needs to be able to crawl websites to create its own feed as only consuming websites that support RSS is a pretty weak prospect.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  None of the RSS that I follow are from blogs, however. Most of it is from webcomics that I follow, YouTube channels, and media aggregator websites that inform me whenever a new episode is out of a television series I follow. All of these websites surely added it themselves deliberately.

joe-collins 6y ago

This may say more about paid conversions than anything else, but Ars Technica's main feed, with truncated article previews, currently has 470k subscribers on Feedly. Their full-article feeds, available as part of their paid subscription, were estimated at only a few hundred users, when they briefly broke a few years back. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1371767 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1371767

Valord 6y ago
I pay Ars firstly for the full article RSS feed and second help support them.
kevindong 6y ago
> Ars Technica's main feed, with truncated article previews, currently has 470k subscribers on Feedly But how many of them are actually using their feed? You reminded me that I signed up for a Feedly account years ago right after Google shut down their RSS product. I just checked and indeed I am subscribed to Ars, among a dozen other feeds.