RSS Readers. That’s Where It’s At.
May 3rd, 2008 | by Brad King |I’ve been saying for months that the end of the banner has already happened, but folks in the newspaper industry — at least the ones I’ve spoken with — tell me I’m crazy.
Or they look at me like I’m crazy before walking away.
The reason I believe this: we live in a search, RSS world where brand means less than it used to and destination sites are increasingly becoming more difficult to create.
This post at the Bivings report backs up my thinking.
At the New Communications Forum conference last week, Chris O’Brien from the San Jose Mercury News mentioned during a presentation that 2/3rds of the traffic to the paper’s website comes from news aggregators (like Google News) and search engines.
For those of you who haven’t used RSS Readers, here’s how they work.
This is my Google RSS Reader. Along the left side is a list of every website that I follow, broken up into categories: Media, Tech Media, People, Weird and I’m getting ready to add Comments (to track the conversations I’m having on other sites.)
On the right side, I can read the text from the stories I get. I have it set up so that I see just the headlines and the deks. When I find something I like, a single click opens up the story.
Now, you can set it up so that I can’t read any of your text in my reader — and certainly some sites do that.
However, I don’t like clicking off the page and oftentimes click over information that is of some interest — but not vital interest to me.
With this Reader, I follow several hundred different feeds, scanning them throughout the day for what I deem relevant information. Even if I’m forced to click to a site, I’m in and out. There is no surfing around for me. There’s no relevant story that will likely keep me on your site longer.
In other words, stories can get me there, but stories won’t keep me there. I can find some other place that gives me the information I want and need. You need to come up with tools to keep me there, information that I find of interest that engages me.
If I’m a drive-by reader (apologies to Limbaugh), the banner is hardly a sustainable way of life. Certainly lead-generation is going to be difficult. I’m barely sticking around enough to see what you’ve done, let alone to click on an associated link.
That means thinking about the news in a new way. Developing tools that empower — and encourage — people to stay on your site for reasons other than you.
I’ll be discussing this more in the Newspaper 2.0 posts later this weekend.
