Why RSS Is Not Mainstream

The Google Reader blog reports that UK newspaper The Guardian has now become the “first major newspaper in the world ” to have full text RSS feeds. A great idea that makes receiving and reading online content a lot easier, and one that should bode well for the paper. Scott Karo at Publishing 2.0 has a sensible rant on why this is an important move that other publishers need to follow.

He explains:

What every other mainstream media company does with their RSS feeds is publish a brief excerpt of the content, forcing readers to click on the headline and visit the publisher’s site in order to actually read the content.

Why? So the publisher can serve ads.

And the problem with this? It defeats the entire purpose of RSS!

The value of using an RSS reader is that you can read content from dozens (or more) sites all in one place without having to visit all of those sites.

But if all the RSS feeds you subscribe to have only an excerpt, and you have to click through to read anything, you spend your entire time clicking to other sites. Which is completely annoying!

And that’s why most people who use RSS readers don’t bother to subscribe to partial content feeds.

And… I think this is one of the reasons why RSS adoption has not gone mainstream.

Publishing 2.0: “Guardian Launches Full RSS Feeds, First Media Company Not To Suppress RSS Adoption”