Shying Away From RSS For Eye Balls

-

Most of the Internet companies survive on Advertisements. Its not an exaggeration if we say for lots of Web2.0 startups, there is no other revenue stream. And these Ads need millions of page impressions, if there has to be any considerable income. So, it will not come as a surprise if content networks and internet companies shy away from RSS.

Its in direct conflict of interest between user experience and revenue streams. RSS provides a much better content distribution channel. But that means, fewer people visiting the web page directly, and that is hurting the number of page impressions and the revenue. 

Read about Yahoo new sites - Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV do not have RSS feeds at all.

"In the past few weeks Yahoo has rolled out three major new web sites - Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV. They're great sites, but none of them has feeds. There's a reason why - eyeballs."

Of course, those three sites that Steve mentions are all very mainstream - and RSS is still not anywhere near mass uptake. But Steve is right that Yahoo has been a leader over the past couple of years in efforts to mainstream RSS, so it is a little disappointing they aren't continuing to push it in the likes of Y! TV.

Source: Yahoo Ramping Up Content Networks - But Scaling Back on RSS?

The Internet stalwart, Amazon does not provide RSS feeds as well. It should have provided RSS feeds to some of its contents if not all of them. But it doesn't. Thought Amazon does not derivce any income from Ads, it needs eye balls to cash on 'impulse' purchases users make when they see products all around the page. Market Research suggests that nobody just buy one thing that they wanted to buy when they go to a store (online or offline), but atleast another item displayed prominently around the product that user originally wanted to buy. Many times, user buys some thing else than what he originally intend to. So Amazon needs more eye-balls than any other website.  The same reason, why major retailers does not allow you to order what you want on phone.  

Some content sites like NYT provides a teaser in RSS and force users to go the website to read the full article. But as web analytics suggest that only a few users are really interested in the full articles after reading the teaser.

Technorati tags: , , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Newsworthy News in Red October : Dow Jones & Tax Dodgers

-
Dow Jones Index crosses the symbolic 10000 figure. U.S. stocks rallied, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 10,000 for the first time in a year, on better-than-estimated earnings at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Intel Corp. Bank of America Corp., American Express Co. and JPMorgan more than doubled since the Dow slid to a 12-year low on March 9 as global financial firms began recovering from $1.6 trillion in writedowns and credit losses. International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. jumped at least 54 percent since March 9 on signs the nation was recovering from the worst recession in seven decades. Source: Bloomberg And, about 7500 International Tax dodgers file for IRS Amnesty to avoid jail Some 7,500 international tax dodgers have applied for an amnesty program that promises no jail time and reduced penalties for tax cheats who come forward, the Internal Revenue Service announced Wednesday. … The program is part of a larger eff...
Read more

USCIS Selects Final H1B Petitions by Random Selection - Almost a 50% chance for each Application

-
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that on April 12 it conducted the computer-generated random selection process to determine which H-1B petitions, subject to the congressionally mandated H-1B cap for fiscal year 2008 (FY 2008), would continue to final processing. USCIS completed this determination ahead of the preliminary schedule noted on April 3, when it announced it had received enough petitions to meet the cap for FY 2008. The 123,480 cap-subject petitions received on April 2 and 3 were labeled with unique numerical identifiers and selected randomly by computer. The chosen numerical identifiers were then transmitted to the appropriate service center for further processing. Source: USCIS Announcement Number 123,480 looks a lot better keeping in view initial estimates. A good 50% chance for each application to be selected.  Update: 3rd May 2007 Hello friends, I understand your anxiety. But don’t loose your hope and/or temper yet. Please wai...
Read more

H1B 2008:USCIS released Preliminary Numbers

-
USCIS today released the final count of number of unique pieces of mail received for H1B petitions. It received 133,000 unique pieces of mail containing H-1B petitions. I guess, each piece of mail will ' mostly ' contain more than one petition, as no company would send each petition in a seperate package and its most unlikely that a firm applies for just one petition. Probably by the end of next week, we might know the actual number of H1B petitions filed and how lucky one must be to get through the initial filter. Source: USCIS Releases Preliminary Number of FY 2008 H-1B Cap Filings  (26KB PDF) 04/05/2007 During Monday and Tuesday, USCIS received 133,000 unique pieces of mail containing H-1B petitions. This is lower that the original USCIS estimate of 150,000. USCIS based the initial estimate on amounts from manifests received along with the mail. USCIS reached the updated number following a physical count of the mail. Each piece of mail may contain more than one H-1B pe...
Read more