As You Were Reading

As you were reading before being so rudely interrupted, partial feeds just end up annoying readers. So much so that they quickly become ex-readers.

Let’s look at a case in point. The book “Freakonomics” was a bestseller a couple of years ago, and the authors (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner) are embarking on a sequel. They readily admit that the sequel was not a slam-dunk until they saw the reaction and readership of the Freakonomics blog. At its peak, the blog had tens of thousands of subscribers – and more importantly, an amazing community of commenters.

A Dramatic Shift

This chart marks the day – August 7th – that the Freakonomics Blog relocated to the New York Times. Its traffic didn’t die, it just got swallowed up into the overall Times site. Moving to the Times was a savvy move, providing a great new base of online readers. However, moving to the Times also meant switching to partial RSS feeds, and ditching many longtime readers.

(I wrote about the move in August, including links to much whining and moaning from Freakonomics fans. I also did a breakdown of another community-altering change that I maintain is a bigger threat.)

Old-School Thinking

The move makes all sorts of business sense for the New York Times. Grab a blog with tens of thousands of subscribers, and pull them in to your site. Only it doesn’t work that way anymore. The point of RSS is freeing the reader to dictate the time and place of consumption of information. Many follow dozens of feeds at once, and can do so with the feeds nicely aggregated and assembled in one place. Make that reader break his stride by switching to another program and entering an address, and you’ve just created an unwelcome disruption.

Simply put – many of the most vocal and most active members of that blog’s community left and didn’t come back. The content was interesting, but not enough to warrant a couple of extra clicks. Let me repeat that: the content was interesting, but not enough to warrant a couple of extra clicks. Such is the nature of online communication. We have the technology to allow for free and unfettered flow of our half of the dialog, and now we want to take a commercial break in the middle?

Compromise Denied

It’s not like the community bailed without a fight. Some would argue the larger sin came days later. Several members of the Freakonomics community suggested that if ads were required by the New York Times – that they be placed in the RSS feed itself. The Times could maintain an ad-free partial RSS feed, and an ad-supported full RSS. The latter was shot down, with no explanation from the wizards behind the curtain. The community wanted to find a way, and instead was turned away.

The New York Times still gets a significant share of traffic. As you can see from the Alexa rankings, the NYT red line didn’t change its trend at all once it absorbed the Freakonomics traffic.

However, if you’ve already got traffic like the New York Times, then partial feeds might be for you.