Adam Gurri

RSS is a Tool for Living in the Long Tail

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Adam Gurri

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Over a year ago, I talked about my information diet and Google Reader was a central part of it. Today, Google has announced that Reader is being shut down. I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss some of the big changes I’ve made to how I make use of RSS, and to my information diet more generally.

These days I don’t read any big sites at all in my RSS reader; instead I use it to keep up with lower-volume, interesting long tail content.

Drowning at the Head of the Tail

This time last year, something like 300 “items”—blog posts or comics—were going through my Google Reader account each day. And that was after already cutting back a fair amount, after reading Clay Johnson’s book.

This is exactly why RSS reading has never really taken off the way that a lot of other sexy web 2.0 things from the same era did—the people who tried it would subscribe to their favorite websites, see “100+ items unread”, get stressed out about it, and never return.

I always just thought those people were wimps. I was perfectly happy living in a perpetual stream of content; I could glance over most of it and pick out the ones that looked interesting. I was aggressive about marking whole folders as read if I didn’t feel like dealing with it. It worked for me.

After reading Johnson’s book, however, I started to rethink the matter. What was I really gaining by staying on top of everything that was posted by sites like The Verge, Gizmodo, and Boing Boing? Any big story blows up on social media. They put out dozens and dozens of posts a day, most of which I don’t even remember glancing over. I could just as easily check these sites once a day, or every so often, and there’ll be plenty for me to choose from then. Meanwhile, they crowd out the low-quantity feeds that constitute the overwhelming majority of my subscriptions.

So I eventually unsubscribed from all the professional, high-quantity posting sites.

What surprised me was how much of a relief I found it. After defending this approach and saying I could handle it, it felt absolutely awesome to give it up. Some days I don’t even bother to check The Verge. It’s been a pretty big validation of Clay Johnson’s argument.

I don’t use Google Reader anymore—I’ve been using NewsBlur for a few months now—so I don’t know exactly how many items are passing through my account on a daily basis anymore. But it is an order of magnitude fewer than it was a year ago.

RSS Readers Were Made for the Long Tail

Imagine all the time lost going to sites when they haven’t updated. This was the original argument for RSS readers, one that I’ve made throughout my usage of them. With RSS readers, that time is not wasted. You only interact with a site when it has updated.

It’s precisely that argument that demonstrates why it’s so pointless to subscribe to a site like The Verge. You know that The Verge will be updated every day. Even during the slow days of the weekend they’ll update two or three times at least. During peak gadget release season, in the middle of the week, they will sometimes post over 70 times in a single day. If you want to read new posts from The Verge, you can go there. There will be new ones.

Right now I would say that the upper end of posting for the feeds I follow is 10 posts a day, if that. The greatest value comes from the feeds that post once a day, or less than once a day, or even less than once a month. There are feeds I’ve subscribed to that have gone dark for years and then suddenly started up again. It costs me nothing to continue subscribing, and if they start up again it becomes a wonderful surprise.

I currently follow dozens of webcomics. The post rate for these varies from 5 times a week, to 3 times a week, to once a week, to once a month, to whenever the hell the artist feels like updating. There is no way I could keep up with the amount of webcomics I do without RSS. It would become unmanageable.

Despite the fact that Google has abandoned the playing field, I think that RSS readers are a phenomenal way to explore the gems that exist out there on the open web. The stuff that is more personal; the stuff that people are doing because they love doing it.

The head of the tail is basically inescapable; why not work a little harder at mining the long tail?

Comments

14 responses to “RSS is a Tool for Living in the Long Tail”

  1. periwinkled Avatar
    periwinkled

    I haven’t the slightest idea what a long tail is, but I still greatly enjoyed this post (and had a very similar experience with subscribing/unsubscribing).

    Reply
    1. AdamGurri Avatar
      AdamGurri

      Glad you enjoyed it!

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

      Basically, think of blockbuster success movies as the head of the tail; they’re the small percentage of movies that make a supermajority of the revenue.

      The rest of movies all fall somewhere in the long tail in terms of how much revenue they made (basically, they all didn’t make very much). The distribution applies to things like blog traffic as well; a few blogs make up the majority of all blog traffic, then there’s a super long tail of tens of millions of blogs that only get anywhere from a few hundred, to a few dozen, to a dozen, to just five views a day.

      “The long tail” is sort of a fancy way of saying “more obscure than the popular stuff” I guess :D.

      Reply
      1. periwinkled Avatar
        periwinkled

        Hipster.

        Reply
  2. dustbury.com » Feeding tube pulled

    […] Meanwhile, Adam Gurri doesn’t see this as the Death of RSS: […]

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  3. Joakim Avatar
    Joakim

    Never really used RSS much, despite trying to years ago. You do raise the big benefit of such a feed, to have content pushed to you when it’s published, which is great for blogs which post irregularly. The only problem is that it’s a horrible XML format.

    This post does raise the issue of whether blogs need to back off on posting so much and start focusing on quality over quantity. Back when blogs were first coming up, the received wisdom was to post as much as you could, to maintain your audience. Probably made sense back then, before RSS and to compete with established media, filling the quality gap with quantity and timeliness. Now that even most major newspapers update their website constantly and host multiple blogs, that’s not much of an advantage for independent blogs anymore.

    It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes bloggers to realize this new competitive situation and embrace quality. The real transition to quality will only happen when they start going paid, like Andrew Sullivan did recently, but you can still produce some quality content before that.

    Reply
    1. AdamGurri Avatar
      AdamGurri

      The vast majority of bloggers will never be paid a single red cent. And some of the truly interesting blogs are the ones that are only seen by perhaps a dozen other people, and only post sporadically. That’s why I love RSS—I don’t have to be frustrated by going to them a dozen times a week and finding that they haven’t updated.

      I also remember when blogs were supposed to be all about quantity. But there came a certain point, as you say, where that became absurd. We can’t compete with Demand Media, which specializes in quantity. We can’t even compete with Instapundit. What’s the point? And we are we even competing? We shouldn’t think we’re going to be doing this for a living; the odds of making a living as a writer are very very small. We blog because we love to write, and we love the opportunity to be read, and to talk to commenters such as yourself 🙂

      I posted like crazy back in ’04, ’05. But now I prefer to write longer, more thought out pieces every so often. Of course the Umlaut has me writing on a weekly basis for the first time in a while, but that’s a project with aspirations of gaining some actual attention. This little blog of mine is just the last refuse of the stories in my head.

      Reply
      1. Joakim Avatar
        Joakim

        You might already be wrong in your prediction: any blog with AdSense- and a majority seem to have it set up, if only because they’re using blogspot- usually will accumulate at least a couple dollars over time. You’re probably right that most haven’t gotten paid yet, considering the payout threshold appears to be $100, but at the very least they’ve accumulated that much in value? 😉 In any case, I think the future is a sea of bloggers getting paid by micropayments, so you are dead wrong. 🙂

        I agree that “the odds of making a living as a writer are very very small,” but the internet has already raised the odds tremendously (check out the next five minutes of this video for some examples) and it will allow a lot more to at least make some money in the future. You are right that those who currently blog for free really have a passion for it, but that means people who could make money off of it have to get a day job, because it’s almost impossible for them to monetize their blogs well right now. Micropayments change all that and I see a lot more quality content coming online when that happens.

        I’m not sure the Umlaut is going about it the right way either, with regular posting. Quality can generate a lot of views, if you can write something that really breaks through the noise. And the only way to hone quality is to spend time on it. So I think a niche blog like the Umlaut would be better served to try and nurture quality, which means posting rarely and irregularly, and allowing feeds to keep you out there. You’re never going to compete with big orgs like The Verge for daily views and you shouldn’t try.

        Someday you will get paid even for “the last refuse of the stories in my head,” it just may not be much more than that “single red cent.” 😉

        Reply
        1. AdamGurri Avatar
          AdamGurri

          As someone who works in digital advertising, I can promise you that I am most definitely not dead wrong now, and am unlikely to be in the future. A supermajority (more than 80%) of sites with AdSense on them never break the $100 within one year, and a sizable majority do not break that threshold ever.

          The Internet definitely removes the barriers to entry to writing, but that isn’t the same thing as saying it increases your probability of success. You can always hand pick examples of the winners, but the key factor is what proportion are the successes relative to those who end up getting nowhere and giving up?

          In any case, you have clear, strong views on this subject, and I definitely connect with that. Do you have a blog of your own, by any chance? I feel like this is a conversation that is better held over a longer period than in a single (or a few) comment threads.

          Reply
          1. Joakim Avatar
            Joakim

            Even with ads, I bet that same supermajority has more than a cent accumulated and it would be easy for ad networks to pay that money out: the only reason they don’t is greed. I have been sending and receiving money for free on Paypal and other payment networks for many years, it’s only a matter of time till they’ll be forced to pay out even small amounts. Somebody like google could even credit other accounts owned by the content creator, like Adwords or Google Play or Checkout, there are many ways to pay it out.

            Of course the internet increases your probability of success: did you watch my linked video? More than 25% of the top-selling books on the Kindle didn’t come from traditional publishers. Now, if your odds went from one in three thousand to one in three hundred, your odds are still low, less than 1%, but they increased by an order of magnitude online. 🙂

            I don’t think you watched my linked video, of the writers who found success by self-publishing on the Kindle. If you mean there are people who self-publish and go nowhere, at least they got that chance to put their work out there: we do know that the Kindle self-published successes wouldn’t even have gotten the chance to publish from traditional publishers, so just the fact that they succeeded on their own raises the probability of success for all.

            No, no blog of my own. I started one a decade ago, then only ever wrote the first post on it, unlike you. 🙂 I have been a regular commenter on other blogs though, for many years. What’s wrong with comment threads? As good a venue as any, I say. 🙂

          2. AdamGurri Avatar
            AdamGurri

            Increasing the probability that a top selling book will come from outside of a traditional publisher does not equal increasing the probability of success for any given author. The barrier to trying to be successful has also fallen, meaning that many more people are trying than before—meaning that there is more competition for attention than there was before.

            And I agree with your sentiment that if people self-publish and don’t succeed, at least they put their work out there. I think this is one way that the Internet has improved all of our lives. But that is a different argument from saying that a given individual has an increased chance of succeeding.

            Whether or not the payout below the $100 is feasible, you don’t find it quite pathetic that they never even reach that point? Does it really matter if, through competition, AdSense is forced to pay sites at the end of each year if the amount they pay is on average less than a dollar for these sites? It’s not going to make a material difference for anyone.

          3. Joakim Avatar
            Joakim

            How do you know “that many more people are trying than before?” It seems to me that your metric is incredibly hard to measure, whereas I just take the increased self-published successes and divide by the US population, which has only gotten slightly larger, and get a higher “probability of success for any given author.” 🙂 Also, the reason these self-published authors often go that route is that they were rejected by the traditional publishers. So if you’re in that category, your odds obviously went up no matter how many new entrants they are, because the old-line publishers wouldn’t give you a chance no matter what.

            Oh, I find it completely pathetic that it is so hard to make money through online ads, that’s why I think micropayments will easily kill off ads. 🙂 I was just making the trivial point that all these writers have at least earned “a single red cent” through ads, even if it might take a couple years to get paid.

            As for comment threads being too narrow, that may be true, but I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to write out a “grand theory of micropayments.” 🙂 I hope to implement it someday, not write about it. 😉 But I’m always willing to discuss, if someone is interested.

          4. AdamGurri Avatar
            AdamGurri

            Comment threads get all tied up in how the issue was framed by the post itself, then there’s the dynamic of comment discussions, etc. Ideally, a post can be where you sit down, think it through, and give the big picture. I’d love to have a post that I can reference and be like “Ah, that’s Joakim’s grand theory of micropayments” or “ah, this is what Joakim believes about ad networks and the long tail”. In comments you’re responding to something specific, in a post you can frame it however you like.

  4. Break the Cycle of Web Addiction | The Ümlaut

    […] to handle, but you shouldn’t slack off here either. Work on curating an RSS reader account that mines the long tail of web content for gems. Try to find longreads that seem promising to put in your Readability or Instapaper […]

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    […] A few months ago the approach I had arrived at was to completely chop off the head of the tail from my RSS feeds. This was much more of a relief than I had expected it to be, and I found that with the extra time […]

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