7 ms·

Feedly Found a New Way to Steal Page Views From Publishers

144 points by user_666 13y ago

uladzislau 13y ago
As an end user I personally hate the fact that I can't choose my own URL shortener and stuck with feedly.com links.
kmfrk 13y ago
They say insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. These people have to stop doing this shit and realize it isn't doing anyone any good.
- RexRollman 13y ago
  Because greed.
oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
For the sake of providing a counter argument, not all publishers monetize page views; some simply want as many eyeballs as possible landing on their content. Additionally, it is almost impossible to guarantee that a request for your content results in a hit on your httpd process (even if you have the resources to send highly restrictive cache headers, browsers, proxies, etc. don't HAVE to honour them)
xpose2000 13y ago
My viewpoint is a bit different on this. First off, Feedly has no way of showing the user the entire article, even if they first direct them to the feedly app. Feedly should show the preview with a snippet, then provide a "View Website" link. That is, unless you output the entire blog post on your RSS feed. If you do this, then that's your own fault. Therefore we are left with the question. Does this harm your site and/or metrics? Short answer. No. Are your users going to your articles from Feedly short links? Probably not. Why would you link your users to a feedly short link to begin with? In the end, what Feedly is doing is doing a disservice to their end user. It makes the process confusing by creating more hoops to get to the original content. Those short links frankly do not need to exist. We all know what Feedly is trying to do, and in the end they should stick to building premium features rather than something like this.
- pmr_ 13y ago
  > unless you output the entire blog post on your RSS feed. If you do this, then that's your own fault. I understand the reasons against posting your entire blog on an RSS feed, but it hurts usability so much. If I'm opening my feed reader I would like to stay there and not have to continuously open a post in my browser and then jump back again. If a RSS feed does not contain the full posts I need to be extremely interested in the content to still follow it.
  - oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
    One alternative, for a site that earns money based on page views, would be to charge a very small subscription fee for its RSS feed. I would certainly pay that for some of the feeds I subscribe to.
    - pmr_ 13y ago
      I can imagine some of the technical difficulties can be challenging to overcome. Especially how do you identify your user? Often you don't see which user is fetching a feed, but only the service through which they are fetching it. For example I'm using Gwene to access my feeds in the same format I access my news groups. But honestly is something I would pay for: provide me access to your raw content (with images, tags, categories and some mark-up) so I can just present it to myself in whichever fashion I want. I'm allergic to most web design and prefer things to be plain text, now I could do that without having to reverse engineer APIs or strange deals so the content-provider still gets page clicks. You also get a whole new eco system for third party applications.
  - judk 13y ago
    As a user, sure. As a publisher, full article feeds are incompatible with web ads.
    - pmr_ 13y ago
      I have seen special ads embedded into feeds. Sure, they are not dynamic, targeted and what not, but they are hand selected, probably relevant, and under total control of the content provider.
michaelhoffman 13y ago
Feedly to publishers: > If you do not want to benefit form this feature, you can also sent me an email and we will quickly opt you out. I think I will just quickly opt out as an end user by not using Feedly.
- TheTechBox 13y ago
  What do you use instead? or do you just use the sites themselves/Twitter etc?
  - julien 13y ago
    There are hundreds of great feed readers out there. Try out http://feedbin.me http://feedbin.me for example!
    - bradleyland 13y ago
      I have been incredibly happy with FeedBin as well. They don't screw with my feed.
  - michaelhoffman 13y ago
    Personally I'm going to use Digg Reader but there are several alternatives.
    - darrenkopp 13y ago
      I've been using Digg Reader since the last time news broke about Feedly doing junk like this and I have really liked it. The only thing I dislike is that something steals focus away when navigating via j / k, so for long articles you have to click into the article pane to then use up / down arrows to scroll. It also seems to refresh feeds a little slower than feedly / google reader, but that's pretty minor. Other than those two small issues, Digg Reader is fantastic.
    - patrickdavey 13y ago
      I've been using Digg Reader for a few months and it works pretty nicely. I'd like it if the reloading of articles could sync in the background, and I'd like to be able to default to my list of feed articles rather than Digg's... however, it's free.. so I can't complain too much. To Digg's favour, I do read some of their articles now (so presumably they get some ad revenue)...
lnanek2 13y ago
He brings up 75% of Twitter being mobile, which sounds like a good number. But, at least on the Google Play store, Feedly seems to have 1 to 5 million installs whereas Twitter has 100 to 500 million. So we're talking about 1% the number of users anyway. So it doesn't much matter what Feedly does since it won't make a dent on your page views anyway.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Depends on your audience. If you have a tech/iOS audience, Feedly users might be 10% of your visitors or more. Plus, Feedly might grow in the future. And in any case, we should not encourage bad behavior, whatever the actual impact.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  Isn't the point that the resultant tweets siphon traffic through feedly, regardless of whether the reader has feedly installed or not?
- judk 13y ago
  But how much of twitters tweets are webpage shares? That's the relevant comparison.
- untog 13y ago
  Not quite. If someone tweets from Feedly you have no idea how large an audience they would be reaching.
moeffju 13y ago
Their annoying UX on Android as well as on the “desktop” and their hijacking of URLs for sharing (enforced redirect) are the reasons I’ve stopped using feedly. This is just another nail in the coffin. Sadly, stunts like these will drive even more people to publish only excerpt feeds, which is very frustrating for users and further impacts the already declining RSS ecosystem.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I find we're using "publisher" in a quite broad manner any more. When I think of a publisher, I think of words on paper. Specifically a newspaper or book. As a publisher, I convey the words to some permanent form (a publication) which is then broadcast in some fashion. The point here? I own the words. I put my name on them. But now we're asked to believe that publishing involves some kind of deeper interaction. If I'm a publisher, I guess, I'm supposed to be creating an immersive, interactive (perhaps "sticky" or "addictive") model of content consumption. People who leave my words alone but take away my interaction with consumers are stealing my works. This just sounds like a playground fight over who gets to be the newspaper delivery boy -- and the reason it's so important isn't because of the content, genre, or authorship of the work in question. Everybody agrees on that. This is important because content creation in 2014 is about a fight for eyeballs. Get them on the page, get them to join an email list, get them involved in the comments sections, get them coming back. Publishers and publications, at least in the way the words have generally been used, have little to do with anything here. The fight is because everybody's looking to psychologically manipulate the poor schmuck who's reading the publication, not for any loftier reason than that.
- matthewmacleod 13y ago
  I don't think that's valid. "Publishers" are those who publish content - that is, make it available to others in some form. The fact that this publishing is via RSS or a website doesn't change that. You can bet that if you created a newspaper that was simply a selection of articles photocopied from other newspapers, you'd have IP issues. Same if you tried it with a book.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    Didn't there use to be "clipping services" for executives that did just this? You'd pay them, they'd subscribe to a bunch of different print services, then they'd clip out what they thought might interest you, compile it, and send it as it's own custom publication? If I gave my passwords to a poor person in a third-world country, might they not consume all of my digital content online for me, summarize it, and send me what's important, in plain text format?
incision 13y ago
By the way, Pulse News has done this for a long time. Share something from the Pulse app and it generates a pulse.me link which functions as an URL shortener through a browser, but redirects to their app install page on mobile.
ilamont 13y ago
ShareThis widgets operate in a similar way.
JohnTHaller 13y ago
And, I just switched from Feedly to Digg in both my Windows Firefox browser and Android app. While not appropriate for folks on feed caching services (FeedBurner et al), it would be interesting to write a quick script/htaccess to detect when Feedly is loading your RSS feed on-server and redirect to a custom one which includes a warning above each story about Feedly stealing page views.
- orvtech 13y ago
  go on... I mean do we know their IPs? they could easily move to amazon and not provide any distinguishable Browser ID, etc..
aaronbrethorst 13y ago
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Just use http://feedbin.me http://feedbin.me. It's three bucks a month. edit: because in Feedly's case you are the product.
- levosmetalo 13y ago
  Why?
- wonderzombie 13y ago
  And by that do you mean to suggest Feedly doesn't offer a paid version? https://feedly.com/index.html#pro https://feedly.com/index.html#pro
elleferrer 13y ago
Can we just please build an exact replica of Google Reader that can handle power users?
Grue3 13y ago
Wow, a RSS reader "steals views from publishers"? Call the police. Guess what? If your article wasn't in my RSS, I wouldn't have read it at all. It didn't steal anything.

144 points by user_666 13y ago

As an end user I personally hate the fact that I can't choose my own URL shortener and stuck with feedly.com links.

kmfrk 13y ago

They say insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. These people have to stop doing this shit and realize it isn't doing anyone any good.

RexRollman 13y ago
Because greed.

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago

For the sake of providing a counter argument, not all publishers monetize page views; some simply want as many eyeballs as possible landing on their content. Additionally, it is almost impossible to guarantee that a request for your content results in a hit on your httpd process (even if you have the resources to send highly restrictive cache headers, browsers, proxies, etc. don't HAVE to honour them)

xpose2000 13y ago

My viewpoint is a bit different on this. First off, Feedly has no way of showing the user the entire article, even if they first direct them to the feedly app. Feedly should show the preview with a snippet, then provide a "View Website" link. That is, unless you output the entire blog post on your RSS feed. If you do this, then that's your own fault. Therefore we are left with the question. Does this harm your site and/or metrics? Short answer. No. Are your users going to your articles from Feedly short links? Probably not. Why would you link your users to a feedly short link to begin with? In the end, what Feedly is doing is doing a disservice to their end user. It makes the process confusing by creating more hoops to get to the original content. Those short links frankly do not need to exist. We all know what Feedly is trying to do, and in the end they should stick to building premium features rather than something like this.

pmr_ 13y ago
> unless you output the entire blog post on your RSS feed. If you do this, then that's your own fault. I understand the reasons against posting your entire blog on an RSS feed, but it hurts usability so much. If I'm opening my feed reader I would like to stay there and not have to continuously open a post in my browser and then jump back again. If a RSS feed does not contain the full posts I need to be extremely interested in the content to still follow it.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  One alternative, for a site that earns money based on page views, would be to charge a very small subscription fee for its RSS feed. I would certainly pay that for some of the feeds I subscribe to.
  - pmr_ 13y ago
    I can imagine some of the technical difficulties can be challenging to overcome. Especially how do you identify your user? Often you don't see which user is fetching a feed, but only the service through which they are fetching it. For example I'm using Gwene to access my feeds in the same format I access my news groups. But honestly is something I would pay for: provide me access to your raw content (with images, tags, categories and some mark-up) so I can just present it to myself in whichever fashion I want. I'm allergic to most web design and prefer things to be plain text, now I could do that without having to reverse engineer APIs or strange deals so the content-provider still gets page clicks. You also get a whole new eco system for third party applications.
- judk 13y ago
  As a user, sure. As a publisher, full article feeds are incompatible with web ads.
  - pmr_ 13y ago
    I have seen special ads embedded into feeds. Sure, they are not dynamic, targeted and what not, but they are hand selected, probably relevant, and under total control of the content provider.

michaelhoffman 13y ago

Feedly to publishers: > If you do not want to benefit form this feature, you can also sent me an email and we will quickly opt you out. I think I will just quickly opt out as an end user by not using Feedly.

TheTechBox 13y ago
What do you use instead? or do you just use the sites themselves/Twitter etc?
- julien 13y ago
  There are hundreds of great feed readers out there. Try out http://feedbin.me http://feedbin.me for example!
  - bradleyland 13y ago
    I have been incredibly happy with FeedBin as well. They don't screw with my feed.
- michaelhoffman 13y ago
  Personally I'm going to use Digg Reader but there are several alternatives.
  - darrenkopp 13y ago
    I've been using Digg Reader since the last time news broke about Feedly doing junk like this and I have really liked it. The only thing I dislike is that something steals focus away when navigating via j / k, so for long articles you have to click into the article pane to then use up / down arrows to scroll. It also seems to refresh feeds a little slower than feedly / google reader, but that's pretty minor. Other than those two small issues, Digg Reader is fantastic.
  - patrickdavey 13y ago
    I've been using Digg Reader for a few months and it works pretty nicely. I'd like it if the reloading of articles could sync in the background, and I'd like to be able to default to my list of feed articles rather than Digg's... however, it's free.. so I can't complain too much. To Digg's favour, I do read some of their articles now (so presumably they get some ad revenue)...

lnanek2 13y ago

He brings up 75% of Twitter being mobile, which sounds like a good number. But, at least on the Google Play store, Feedly seems to have 1 to 5 million installs whereas Twitter has 100 to 500 million. So we're talking about 1% the number of users anyway. So it doesn't much matter what Feedly does since it won't make a dent on your page views anyway.

coldtea 13y ago
Depends on your audience. If you have a tech/iOS audience, Feedly users might be 10% of your visitors or more. Plus, Feedly might grow in the future. And in any case, we should not encourage bad behavior, whatever the actual impact.
oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
Isn't the point that the resultant tweets siphon traffic through feedly, regardless of whether the reader has feedly installed or not?
judk 13y ago
But how much of twitters tweets are webpage shares? That's the relevant comparison.
untog 13y ago
Not quite. If someone tweets from Feedly you have no idea how large an audience they would be reaching.

moeffju 13y ago

Their annoying UX on Android as well as on the “desktop” and their hijacking of URLs for sharing (enforced redirect) are the reasons I’ve stopped using feedly. This is just another nail in the coffin. Sadly, stunts like these will drive even more people to publish only excerpt feeds, which is very frustrating for users and further impacts the already declining RSS ecosystem.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I find we're using "publisher" in a quite broad manner any more. When I think of a publisher, I think of words on paper. Specifically a newspaper or book. As a publisher, I convey the words to some permanent form (a publication) which is then broadcast in some fashion. The point here? I own the words. I put my name on them. But now we're asked to believe that publishing involves some kind of deeper interaction. If I'm a publisher, I guess, I'm supposed to be creating an immersive, interactive (perhaps "sticky" or "addictive") model of content consumption. People who leave my words alone but take away my interaction with consumers are stealing my works. This just sounds like a playground fight over who gets to be the newspaper delivery boy -- and the reason it's so important isn't because of the content, genre, or authorship of the work in question. Everybody agrees on that. This is important because content creation in 2014 is about a fight for eyeballs. Get them on the page, get them to join an email list, get them involved in the comments sections, get them coming back. Publishers and publications, at least in the way the words have generally been used, have little to do with anything here. The fight is because everybody's looking to psychologically manipulate the poor schmuck who's reading the publication, not for any loftier reason than that.

matthewmacleod 13y ago
I don't think that's valid. "Publishers" are those who publish content - that is, make it available to others in some form. The fact that this publishing is via RSS or a website doesn't change that. You can bet that if you created a newspaper that was simply a selection of articles photocopied from other newspapers, you'd have IP issues. Same if you tried it with a book.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Didn't there use to be "clipping services" for executives that did just this? You'd pay them, they'd subscribe to a bunch of different print services, then they'd clip out what they thought might interest you, compile it, and send it as it's own custom publication? If I gave my passwords to a poor person in a third-world country, might they not consume all of my digital content online for me, summarize it, and send me what's important, in plain text format?

incision 13y ago

By the way, Pulse News has done this for a long time. Share something from the Pulse app and it generates a pulse.me link which functions as an URL shortener through a browser, but redirects to their app install page on mobile.

ilamont 13y ago

ShareThis widgets operate in a similar way.

JohnTHaller 13y ago

And, I just switched from Feedly to Digg in both my Windows Firefox browser and Android app. While not appropriate for folks on feed caching services (FeedBurner et al), it would be interesting to write a quick script/htaccess to detect when Feedly is loading your RSS feed on-server and redirect to a custom one which includes a warning above each story about Feedly stealing page views.

orvtech 13y ago
go on... I mean do we know their IPs? they could easily move to amazon and not provide any distinguishable Browser ID, etc..

aaronbrethorst 13y ago

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Just use http://feedbin.me http://feedbin.me. It's three bucks a month. edit: because in Feedly's case you are the product.

levosmetalo 13y ago
Why?
wonderzombie 13y ago
And by that do you mean to suggest Feedly doesn't offer a paid version? https://feedly.com/index.html#pro https://feedly.com/index.html#pro

elleferrer 13y ago

Can we just please build an exact replica of Google Reader that can handle power users?

Grue3 13y ago

Wow, a RSS reader "steals views from publishers"? Call the police. Guess what? If your article wasn't in my RSS, I wouldn't have read it at all. It didn't steal anything.