Google Reader Causes RSS Revolt

My feedreader was alive with chatter about Google Reader recently. What was initially heralded as a cool feature has turned into potential fuel for mutiny. Watching from the sidelines, it is all fun, but does have an impact on bloggers, particularly those wanting to sell advertising.

What is this controversial feature?

If you add a feed in Google Reader but rather than set an explicit URL you do a search, Reader will come back with a list of potential matches along with how many people are subscribed.

Google Reader

Google Reader

Knowing that a good percentage of people are now using Google Reader as their main feed reader, up to 20% at times according to my own blog, means you can extrapolate readership for any blog now without those numbers being made public by the blogger.

Of course we all know bigger is not always better but you try telling that to the kids who are getting upset at the counts.

Unfortunately, it is not all that accurate. While it does broadly work for some blogs, other blogs are getting their subscriber numbers heavily discounted or bloated. There are two main reasons:

  1. Multiple feeds - Many people have various RSS, Atom, and category specific feed options. Some even allow you to subscribe to both full and partial versions of the same feed.
  2. Feed Bundling - Most feed readers “helpfully” recommend feeds you might want to subscribe to. Most users do not delete these default feeds. This makes some subscriber counts look way better than they really are.

The thing many people are forgetting is RSS reader counts are inherently unscientific. With an email subscriber list you know who has subscribed but not much more with any confidence, with RSS it is even worse, you just know a certain IP address has requested your feed at some point. You don’t know if the article has been read, by whom, nor if they liked it.

I wrote about what I called RSS+ a while ago, I think this Google Reader debacle proves we need something new to replace the whole RSS/Atom/Feed thing. Let’s get feeds that work for both readers and publishers.

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Posted on October 16, 2007 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Blogging

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One Response to “Google Reader Causes RSS Revolt”

  1. My Ghillie » Google Reader Causes RSS Revolt : Codswallop on October 19th, 2007 2:27 am

    [...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt [...]

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