4 ms·

RSS has more of a commercial problem. You can’t put ads in it so sites are incentivized to force a site visit. Which in turn forces them to withhold the bulk of

by Havoc 1y ago

RSS has more of a commercial problem. You can’t put ads in it so sites are incentivized to force a site visit. Which in turn forces them to withhold the bulk of the value from the feed itself. Ie just include first sentence or two. Which kills the usefulness of the feed as anything more thank headlines and link. Headlines in turn are all clickbait these days so those don’t have much info density either.

Scene_Cast2 1y ago
Why can't you put ads on RSS? Either in the story itself (by the site or aggregator) or as a "promoted item" in the feed (by the aggregator). If anything, the Google Discover (or whatever it's called) is not too different, just that you don't control which exact news sources you're subscribed to. I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.
- danesparza 1y ago
  I'm just here to say that I'm still bitter about Google Reader. :-(
nashashmi 1y ago
Ads are a recent innovation on top of existing web standards. A new generation of changeable scripted ads had emerged and this was not compatible with XML. The old generation of ads was still compatible but not scalable, similar to how podcast sponsor ads work (immutable after publishing), and so did not get much traction.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Podcasts ads are definitely mutable after publishing. Dynamic ad insertion has been a thing for years. If you download an old Stuff You Should Know podcast, you will get a new ad even based on where you were when you downloaded it.
  - xp84 1y ago
    And where you(r GeoIP data) were as well. I remember a lot of local car dealer ads being on that show for a while.
- yoz-y 1y ago
  Some podcasts do dynamic ad insertion. It has a plethora of inconveniences, but it does exist. I’d rather it didn’t but here we are.
em-bee 1y ago
why not? you can format ads as an entry in the rss feed. in fact it would not even bother me. i could train my rss reader to detect the ad based on keywords and mark it, and even if not, i'd just skip over it manually, mark it as read, and it's gone. as long as the frequency of ads is not to much that is better than an ad on a website that is permanently visible.
mariusor 1y ago
> You can’t put ads in it That's a silly thing to say. Of course you can put ads in it since it allows linking to things. What you mean probably, is that it's not as easy as embedding some google ads markup in your sidebar.
- jasonjayr 1y ago
  What you can't do, is add all sorts of invasive tracking to RSS to confirm that the user saw the ad, and that it wasn't filtered out. You have to get more creative with wording that works the ad into the descriptions for the articles, and even then, there's no guarantee. Advertisers love to burn money, but they draw the line at not being able to verify that the spend did what was promised.
  - esotericimpl 1y ago
    This is definitely false, see Facebook's pivot to video.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      Wasn't that famously based on advertising network lies?
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    You can add an image, can’t you? So the situation is not worse than email, and there’s plenty of tracking there (that good email clients block, but that doesn’t matter in a world where almost everyone uses the Gmail web UI).
    - smelendez 1y ago
      It's a little worse than email. With email, you normally use unique image and link URLs for each recipient, so you generally know who's opened the email and what they've clicked and can map that to their email address and whatever other information you have about them. With RSS, you generally don't have any information about who's accessing the feed other than an IP address. It is possible to require users to log in and receive a unique RSS URL, which is what podcasts often do to give paid subscribers access to paywalled episodes, but that's not common for web RSS.
palata 1y ago
Sounds about right. Podcasts inject ads into the content: from RSS you get the link and description of the episode, and inside the episode are ads. I guess that's why RSS is still a thing for podcasts? :-)
oceanhaiyang 1y ago
I hate that the self hosting newsletter does this.
scarface_74 1y ago
John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has made his entire living for 20 years by putting a once a week sponsored post in RSS along with the full content of his posts from his site in RSS.
tonkinai 1y ago
Man, RSS still brings me so much nostalgia. Anyone still feel the pain when Google discontinued its RSS reader?
- qw 1y ago
  > Anyone still feel the pain when Google discontinued its RSS reader? Yes, but mostly because of a lost opportunity. I was working on my own web based reader when Google made a significant upgrade to their reader. It was similar to what I had made, so I thought it would be foolish to compete with Google and stopped working on it. I wonder where RSS would be now if Google had not discouraged potential competitors.
- kevstev 1y ago
  Feedly works more or less the same. I have no issues with it.
ryukoposting 1y ago
There are also some efficiency-related shortcomings. I'd wager that most feed readers either implement conditional requests incorrectly, or they don't implement conditional requests at all. Polling rates also tend to be stupid, on the order of 1-30 minutes with no regard for how often any given feed actually has new posts. This creates server-side pressure to make your feed as small as possible, which always means excluding content.
- account42 1y ago
  The first point sounds like an implementation issue rather than a protocol one. I also don't agree that most readers have this problem. Polling rate also has nothing to do with frequency of updates if you care to receive those updates in a timely manner. I haven't seen a reader default to 30 minutes or less. Probably in both cases you just notice the bad implementations more because they make more requests. And Atom supports pagination so you can limit the main feed url to be just one entry while still allowing for clients to retrieve older ones.
  - DamonHD 1y ago
    My only Atom feeds are already short, and the paging mechanism would I think be hard to do in my static site, but yes, thanks for the reminder!
- DamonHD 1y ago
  Yes indeedy. My one-update-per-month feed gets pulled over 10 times per hour by Podbean for example: https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-site-technicals-99.html#2025-08-31 https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-site-technicals-99.html#202...
  - ryukoposting 1y ago
    10 times per hour? Yikes. I'm a small enough deal that I can call out specific readers at the top of a new post. A couple weeks ago I put up a post that started with the aside "hey one of you has a Turkish IP and you're pulling the whole feed every 10 minutes, please stop doing that."
est 1y ago
It's more like a one-way problem. Authors don't know how far the RSS reached nor who reads the articles. Readers don't know how to reply to the author in a standard way (like an email)
zahlman 1y ago
Everywhere that ads are the only way to create revenue streams, that should be considered a commercial problem in itself. It should be way easier to pay (and charge) securely for services like this by now.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Most ads seem to be unwanted, but some of them seem to work to make the nuisance worthwhile. People regularly stumble upon content randomly, and get exposed to ads. Paying for content is a conscious action, it has a higher activation threshold than just clicking mindlessly on something that looks fun. Then, transactions are expensive; micropayments are not a thing. Subscriptions alleviate that a bit. Large middlemen alleviate that even more: Apple and Google can make micropayments like $0.50 viable within their ecosystems, so apps or in-app purchases can be tiny, and allow to remove ads for paying users. Attempts to do something similar for websites never took off, sadly.
prism56 1y ago
FreshRSS on android will fetch the full article. Such a good feature I wished more applications used. I host freshRSS and it's been amazing for me.
- walterbell 1y ago
  Also https://lireapp.com https://lireapp.com on iOS and macOS, has optional local cache of text and images for offline reading of RSS feeds.
DamonHD 1y ago
I only put a summary of each item in my RSS feeds because I do not want to be redundantly sending the same body data over and over but I do want a complete history available easily in at least some versions of the feeds. And some of the primary content is audio (or video) so cannot be dumped into the RSS usably.

by Havoc 1y ago

Scene_Cast2 1y ago

Why can't you put ads on RSS? Either in the story itself (by the site or aggregator) or as a "promoted item" in the feed (by the aggregator). If anything, the Google Discover (or whatever it's called) is not too different, just that you don't control which exact news sources you're subscribed to. I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.

danesparza 1y ago
I'm just here to say that I'm still bitter about Google Reader. :-(

nashashmi 1y ago

Ads are a recent innovation on top of existing web standards. A new generation of changeable scripted ads had emerged and this was not compatible with XML. The old generation of ads was still compatible but not scalable, similar to how podcast sponsor ads work (immutable after publishing), and so did not get much traction.

scarface_74 1y ago
Podcasts ads are definitely mutable after publishing. Dynamic ad insertion has been a thing for years. If you download an old Stuff You Should Know podcast, you will get a new ad even based on where you were when you downloaded it.
- xp84 1y ago
  And where you(r GeoIP data) were as well. I remember a lot of local car dealer ads being on that show for a while.
yoz-y 1y ago
Some podcasts do dynamic ad insertion. It has a plethora of inconveniences, but it does exist. I’d rather it didn’t but here we are.

em-bee 1y ago

why not? you can format ads as an entry in the rss feed. in fact it would not even bother me. i could train my rss reader to detect the ad based on keywords and mark it, and even if not, i'd just skip over it manually, mark it as read, and it's gone. as long as the frequency of ads is not to much that is better than an ad on a website that is permanently visible.

mariusor 1y ago

> You can’t put ads in it That's a silly thing to say. Of course you can put ads in it since it allows linking to things. What you mean probably, is that it's not as easy as embedding some google ads markup in your sidebar.

jasonjayr 1y ago
What you can't do, is add all sorts of invasive tracking to RSS to confirm that the user saw the ad, and that it wasn't filtered out. You have to get more creative with wording that works the ad into the descriptions for the articles, and even then, there's no guarantee. Advertisers love to burn money, but they draw the line at not being able to verify that the spend did what was promised.
- esotericimpl 1y ago
  This is definitely false, see Facebook's pivot to video.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    Wasn't that famously based on advertising network lies?
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  You can add an image, can’t you? So the situation is not worse than email, and there’s plenty of tracking there (that good email clients block, but that doesn’t matter in a world where almost everyone uses the Gmail web UI).
  - smelendez 1y ago
    It's a little worse than email. With email, you normally use unique image and link URLs for each recipient, so you generally know who's opened the email and what they've clicked and can map that to their email address and whatever other information you have about them. With RSS, you generally don't have any information about who's accessing the feed other than an IP address. It is possible to require users to log in and receive a unique RSS URL, which is what podcasts often do to give paid subscribers access to paywalled episodes, but that's not common for web RSS.

palata 1y ago

Sounds about right. Podcasts inject ads into the content: from RSS you get the link and description of the episode, and inside the episode are ads. I guess that's why RSS is still a thing for podcasts? :-)

oceanhaiyang 1y ago

I hate that the self hosting newsletter does this.

scarface_74 1y ago

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has made his entire living for 20 years by putting a once a week sponsored post in RSS along with the full content of his posts from his site in RSS.

tonkinai 1y ago

Man, RSS still brings me so much nostalgia. Anyone still feel the pain when Google discontinued its RSS reader?

qw 1y ago
> Anyone still feel the pain when Google discontinued its RSS reader? Yes, but mostly because of a lost opportunity. I was working on my own web based reader when Google made a significant upgrade to their reader. It was similar to what I had made, so I thought it would be foolish to compete with Google and stopped working on it. I wonder where RSS would be now if Google had not discouraged potential competitors.
kevstev 1y ago
Feedly works more or less the same. I have no issues with it.

ryukoposting 1y ago

There are also some efficiency-related shortcomings. I'd wager that most feed readers either implement conditional requests incorrectly, or they don't implement conditional requests at all. Polling rates also tend to be stupid, on the order of 1-30 minutes with no regard for how often any given feed actually has new posts. This creates server-side pressure to make your feed as small as possible, which always means excluding content.

account42 1y ago
The first point sounds like an implementation issue rather than a protocol one. I also don't agree that most readers have this problem. Polling rate also has nothing to do with frequency of updates if you care to receive those updates in a timely manner. I haven't seen a reader default to 30 minutes or less. Probably in both cases you just notice the bad implementations more because they make more requests. And Atom supports pagination so you can limit the main feed url to be just one entry while still allowing for clients to retrieve older ones.
- DamonHD 1y ago
  My only Atom feeds are already short, and the paging mechanism would I think be hard to do in my static site, but yes, thanks for the reminder!
DamonHD 1y ago
Yes indeedy. My one-update-per-month feed gets pulled over 10 times per hour by Podbean for example: https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-site-technicals-99.html#2025-08-31 https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-site-technicals-99.html#202...
- ryukoposting 1y ago
  10 times per hour? Yikes. I'm a small enough deal that I can call out specific readers at the top of a new post. A couple weeks ago I put up a post that started with the aside "hey one of you has a Turkish IP and you're pulling the whole feed every 10 minutes, please stop doing that."

est 1y ago

It's more like a one-way problem. Authors don't know how far the RSS reached nor who reads the articles. Readers don't know how to reply to the author in a standard way (like an email)

zahlman 1y ago

Everywhere that ads are the only way to create revenue streams, that should be considered a commercial problem in itself. It should be way easier to pay (and charge) securely for services like this by now.

nine_k 1y ago
Most ads seem to be unwanted, but some of them seem to work to make the nuisance worthwhile. People regularly stumble upon content randomly, and get exposed to ads. Paying for content is a conscious action, it has a higher activation threshold than just clicking mindlessly on something that looks fun. Then, transactions are expensive; micropayments are not a thing. Subscriptions alleviate that a bit. Large middlemen alleviate that even more: Apple and Google can make micropayments like $0.50 viable within their ecosystems, so apps or in-app purchases can be tiny, and allow to remove ads for paying users. Attempts to do something similar for websites never took off, sadly.

prism56 1y ago

FreshRSS on android will fetch the full article. Such a good feature I wished more applications used. I host freshRSS and it's been amazing for me.

walterbell 1y ago
Also https://lireapp.com https://lireapp.com on iOS and macOS, has optional local cache of text and images for offline reading of RSS feeds.

DamonHD 1y ago

I only put a summary of each item in my RSS feeds because I do not want to be redundantly sending the same body data over and over but I do want a complete history available easily in at least some versions of the feeds. And some of the primary content is audio (or video) so cannot be dumped into the RSS usably.