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Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered).

Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.

Forgeties79 5y ago
As a podcast producer, I wish we would wholesale replace RSS soon. It feels like the most paper clip nonsense at this point.
- trvr 5y ago
  What would you replace it with? Bonus points if your answer is somehow de-centralized like RSS already is. ;-)
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Replace it with what?
  - riffic 5y ago
    activitystreams
- gnuj3 5y ago
qbasic_forever 5y ago
It's really no different than email lists, medium, substack, etc. which are all working through ways of effectively monetizing themselves. RSS feed for your content + a patreon or similar place (that potentially gives you access to a premium RSS feed with more/expanded content) would totally be feasible.
caslon 5y ago
Daring Fireball has for years, and Gruber's gotten rich off of it.
pixelrevision 5y ago
That, analytics and auth. Which is a shame. I can’t deal with most news sites now because I’m usually reading them on my phone. There’s just so much garbage between ads, scroll locked videos and JavaScript breaking the pages. AMP was supposed to help with this stuff but it breaks all the time too. I know I’d happily pay for plain text content that I can format myself but I’m guessing there’s just no market for that sort of thing.
mmahemoff 5y ago
Email ads are more effective than RSS. The reader's email address is known (obviously!) and the content can be targeted individually. RSS is typically a single feed for everyone. Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is high and aggregators often inadvertently leak premium links. In contrast, someone's inbox is about as private as it gets.
- gen220 5y ago
  You can mitigate link sharing by counting the feed reader hits per link (anything more than two standard deviations is probably a shared link, which you can set a revocation policy for). You can reject requests to content that don’t have a non-revoked referrer. This way, they can only get your content by copy-pasting content and rehosting the feed, which is an unavoidable risk. In any case, as Netflix’s early history shows, depending on your cost structure, link sharing is likely a net positive. It’s probably only worth prosecuting the feeds that get shared with 100s of people. It definitely is more complicated, but the tools to make it simple are easy to build! Maybe we’ll see growth in this space. One can dream
  - mmahemoff 5y ago
    You can, albeit with some effort involved, e.g. Ben Thomson has mentioned Stratechery does some kind of link counting like that with the podcast feed. It's a good point that some amount of unauthorised sharing can be a positive. The main issue is it's hard to control without also having false positives, where the paying subscriber is annoyed by their service being revoked, having to re-auth, etc.
naravara 5y ago
Successful blogs I follow do sponsored RSS feeds. It’s perfectly feasible to work ads into RSS content. What’s not doable is targeted ads, but I’d rather those all go away anyway.
pizza234 5y ago
RSS feeds don't replace a website. Most of the websites don't publish their whole articles on the RSS feed, only a summary (or even just a line). Therefore, RSS doesn't cause any advertisement loss, as the user needs to go to the website anyway (which, to be clear, is totally fine - RSS still works as filter/preview, which is very helpful).
- medstrom 5y ago
  This behavior is typical for news sites, but in fact the majority of blogs don't truncate their feed items.

Forgeties79 5y ago

As a podcast producer, I wish we would wholesale replace RSS soon. It feels like the most paper clip nonsense at this point.

trvr 5y ago
What would you replace it with? Bonus points if your answer is somehow de-centralized like RSS already is. ;-)
Buttons840 5y ago
Replace it with what?
- riffic 5y ago
  activitystreams
gnuj3 5y ago

qbasic_forever 5y ago

It's really no different than email lists, medium, substack, etc. which are all working through ways of effectively monetizing themselves. RSS feed for your content + a patreon or similar place (that potentially gives you access to a premium RSS feed with more/expanded content) would totally be feasible.

caslon 5y ago

Daring Fireball has for years, and Gruber's gotten rich off of it.

pixelrevision 5y ago

That, analytics and auth. Which is a shame. I can’t deal with most news sites now because I’m usually reading them on my phone. There’s just so much garbage between ads, scroll locked videos and JavaScript breaking the pages. AMP was supposed to help with this stuff but it breaks all the time too. I know I’d happily pay for plain text content that I can format myself but I’m guessing there’s just no market for that sort of thing.

mmahemoff 5y ago

Email ads are more effective than RSS. The reader's email address is known (obviously!) and the content can be targeted individually. RSS is typically a single feed for everyone. Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is high and aggregators often inadvertently leak premium links. In contrast, someone's inbox is about as private as it gets.

gen220 5y ago
You can mitigate link sharing by counting the feed reader hits per link (anything more than two standard deviations is probably a shared link, which you can set a revocation policy for). You can reject requests to content that don’t have a non-revoked referrer. This way, they can only get your content by copy-pasting content and rehosting the feed, which is an unavoidable risk. In any case, as Netflix’s early history shows, depending on your cost structure, link sharing is likely a net positive. It’s probably only worth prosecuting the feeds that get shared with 100s of people. It definitely is more complicated, but the tools to make it simple are easy to build! Maybe we’ll see growth in this space. One can dream
- mmahemoff 5y ago
  You can, albeit with some effort involved, e.g. Ben Thomson has mentioned Stratechery does some kind of link counting like that with the podcast feed. It's a good point that some amount of unauthorised sharing can be a positive. The main issue is it's hard to control without also having false positives, where the paying subscriber is annoyed by their service being revoked, having to re-auth, etc.

naravara 5y ago

Successful blogs I follow do sponsored RSS feeds. It’s perfectly feasible to work ads into RSS content. What’s not doable is targeted ads, but I’d rather those all go away anyway.

pizza234 5y ago

RSS feeds don't replace a website. Most of the websites don't publish their whole articles on the RSS feed, only a summary (or even just a line). Therefore, RSS doesn't cause any advertisement loss, as the user needs to go to the website anyway (which, to be clear, is totally fine - RSS still works as filter/preview, which is very helpful).

medstrom 5y ago
This behavior is typical for news sites, but in fact the majority of blogs don't truncate their feed items.