My RSS Trends and Why I Read What I Read
May 20th, 2008 | by Brad King |
Image by Gustav H via Flickr
Syndication is — and will continue to be — an important trend in online media simply because it is so specific to the medium.
These feeds can’t be replicated in traditional media, thus making it one of the areas that all companies should be investigating for revenue and traffic generation. Of course, this means the end of the banner model as we know it, which has already started to decline in terms of growth areas because it’s based on a paper model where pages are important — not data.
That thesis, though, got me thinking about how I consume my own media since I have a good number of feeds — probably in the neighborhood of 150-200 feeds constantly updating in my Google Reader. With so much information flowing in — and I check my reader three or four times a day, scanning the headlines, I wondered how much I was actually reading and what made me click on a story.
Here is some data I’ve collected on myself:
The first think I absolutely don’t click on feeds that only included headlines. If there isn’t a dek attached to the story, I almost never star, share and click on that. I figure if they organization isn’t going to tease me with their information then it’s probably not worth reading. It’s very much like a movie studio not allowing critics to pre-screen a movie. My initial reaction: what the hell are you hiding.
I have also stopped reading RSS feeds that make me click to a story, which then requires me to click again to read the entire piece. That’s too much work. If I wanted to click through 10 pages to find what you wrote, I’d have visited your homepage.
Enough of the casual observations, here is the data:
Here is a snapshot of the top feeds coming into my Reader. What’s interesting to me is the number of posts that come through and small number of clicks that actually generates. Sure, it’s a higher click-through rate than advertisements, but not by much — and many of these are sites I find interesting, informative or entertaining.
The reading data, though, suggests that once I find relevant places - I’m more apt to click on links.
I don’t check my data that often — and since I did this screen shot a few weeks ago, the percentage read has dropped across the board — but it’s instructive to notice that even on the blogs and news outlets I’ve deemed interesting to my life, I rarely read more than 16 percent of the headlines.
I’ve almost completely stopped reading the Project for Excellent in Journalism because the organization only feeds headlines, which then link to a page with only the headline, which I then have to click in order to read the story.
That’s not worth my time.
The blog posts on Wired Jouranlists, a NING social network group, has the highest rate of return — but that essentially amounts to a dozen blogs which always intrigue me spattered with an occasional link to an insightful piece.
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Playing around with this data underscores my larger point about informational reporting. I can sift through what I do — which is most interesting to me — and analyze and adjust my reading habits. I can do this because I have access to the data (which I turn into information) most relevant to me.
News organizations should be doing that as well, parsing out what their readers are doing, sharing and commenting on and building areas — or better yet, allowing users to build those areas — for communication. It’s also instructive to see what areas you aren’t writing about or what areas aren’t getting hits and figuring out how to adjust that.
