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Why RSS feed adoption sucks doesn’t get any simpler than this

by Steven Hodson on November 1, 2008 · Comments

Back on October 20th I wrote a post at The Inquisitr about the slowing adoption rate of RSS feeds called RSS Adoption Stalling Because It Isn’t Joe Six Pack Enough which was a response to a study by the Forrester Group. The study was about how they believed that RSS feed adoption was stalling because as Steve Rubel put it RSS too geeky.

While this discussion was going on Svetlana Gladkova joined in the fray with her post on Profy.com titled Low RSS Adoption: Is It About Tools or Needs? I joined the comments that started up around her post and as result I am still getting notifications as people still occasionally stop by Svetlana’s post and are good enough to leave their thoughts in the comments. Not long ago a new comment came to me via email from that post on Profy that had been left by R. Phipps and I think more than anything this comment exactly typifies what the problem is with RSS not being more widely adopted; and us smart asses running all these blogs are partly to blame

I love RSS feeds but I find it difficult in a lot of instances to add Web sites with RSS. I’ll find a Web page that says RSS on it and when I click on the RSS icon it gives me the HTML code of the Web page so then I can’t subscribe to it. Even when a Web page has actually said click here to subscribe to our RSS feed, I still get the HTML page. I read somewhere that a lot of Web sites don’t know how to provide RSS feeds to visitors. In a very few instances the link to the RSS feed subscribes me without any trouble at all… but that’s the exception rather than the rule. I think that is your answer as to why most people haven’t embraced with great tool.

Now take a minute and make sure you have really read what R. Phipps wrote. If the usability problem doesn’t jump right out at you re-read it because in one simple paragraph R. has pointed out the problem that I bet stalls 95% of newcomers to RSS.

Just to make sure we are clear on this let me re-interate the excruciately painful key point here

I’ll find a Web page that says RSS on it and when I click on the RSS icon it gives me the HTML code of the Web page so then I can’t subscribe to it.

Now I would bet that the larger majority of readers here at WinExtra are old hands at RSS feeds, RSS clients; whether they be one’s like GReader or FeedDemon, and they know exactly what to do when they land on a site with an RSS feed. I would bet that the number is a little smaller at Profy.com (but only a little) and still smaller (possibly much) at The Inquisitr. That is primarily due to the target market of those blogs; but it would also apply the same to most blogs that have RSS feeds - the more they aim to get their traffic from the regular web surfer the more likely that they will see a smaller adoption of their RSS feed.

This is directly related to R. Phipps point. The fact is that unless you know what you are doing RSS feed subscription is totally confusing. I even remember back to when I first started using RSS feed and how in the beginning I did exactly what R. Phipps did and couldn’t understand what the hell I was doing wrong. People don’t like being made to feel stupid and trying to subscribe to RSS feeds for the first time if you don’t have anyone who understands the process close by can do exactly that - make a person feel stupid.

Sure once you even subscribe to your first couple of feeds you’ve got the problem licked and you’re on your way but you ask any usability expert and they’ll tell you that by making that very first subscription so difficult you are turning away millions of possible readers. I’m not sure exactly what the answer is for that one click subscription; regardless of client, but until we get that figured out RSS will never reach the mass mainstream.

In response to some of the feedback I have gotten over my recent posts about RSS feeds and the confusion that newcomers can about about them I have put together two dedicated pages about RSS. They are available in the sidebar area in the Subscription section or you can select them from here:

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  • I would tend to have to agree. Outside of general trends that people don't spend a great deal of their personal time reading anything, instead watching television, as well as the general ignorance the technology even exists, the "one-click option" is about the best.

    I look at my own habits. I have lived in various technology circles for well over a decade, but only this year have I really discovered all of this - and that was because I had a desire to connect with people across America - and the world - that share my interests.

    There was no compelling reason, up until then, why I would want the other "form of RSS" - e-mail. Afterall, I had a client (Outlook), I was always in it, and I was used to how it worked.

    A reader on my blog unsubscribed to e-mail recently. I e-mailed her to say thank you, and ask for any advice on increasing stickiness. She commented that she was simply transitioning her medium to RSS. In some brief discussion, I understood that in order to move to more widespread consumption, RSS is necessary and preferred.

    Interesting thoughts all the way around, and good points on your post.

    Regards,
    Ken Stewart
    ChangeForge.com
  • I have a background in email marketing and they have subscribe / unsubscribe figured out. I have thought about ways statzen.com could help this problem, but without having unique feed URLs for each subscriber it would be hard to provide unsubscribe, topical subscriptions, etc. Unique feed URLs presents new problems with usability, etc.

    However, maybe having an advanced RSS subscription option would be good. It could allow users to subscribe to specific topics, etc. It would also provide a way for a form to let the user select their reader for the actual subscription action to take place (somewhat similar to FeedBurner's XSLT display). What would be really unique is if an unsubscribe option could be included in every post's footer. (Just rambling off the top of my head here).
  • Steven, that's an excellent example of basing a whole post on a single comment. Our problem as tech bloggers is often that we fail to realize that people in the so-called mainstream market may think otherwise. Comments is exactly what is supposed to help us understand these people and what they really think about all the things we can discuss for hours - and this is what makes comments so valuable.
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