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Crypt

There was a point when raw RSS was all we had. Not only was it the one and only way for us to track the authors that we liked, but it was also the premiere method of giving your “vote” to a publication. Subscribing to a blog’s feed was a little pat on the back, a way of telling the author that you cared enough about what he or she was writing to come back again.

Let’s fast-forward a bit.


Lifestreaming

As chained as I still am to my feed reader, it has been a long time since I added a batch of new feeds. Yet I read more new content from interesting authors now than when I was adding three or four subscriptions a day.

What has changed? These days I don’t need to subscribe to any particular feed to show someone I like his or her writing — thanks to Twitter, Friendfeed and the host of other services like them I can tell that author directly.

When I take a look at my Friendfeed the first thing I notice is that almost everything in it is interesting. With individual feed subscriptions I would have thousands of posts that would languish unread. This isn’t bad luck, it illustrates the primary advantage of human mediated news. Instead of choosing publications that I think are compelling, I am choosing people who share my interests. Where a blog might have a quota to meet, or some external impetus to post things that I’d have to sift through — for the most part, people are just looking for the most interesting news they can find.

Let’s look at some numbers.

According to Universal McCann, off-sight content consumption has increased by 153% in the last 9 months. Pheedo, a company that monetizes feeds, attributes much of this growth not to individuals subscribing to feeds one by one but to lifestreaming services.

Lifestreaming is evolving as the next generation of media consumption and social networking. The major shift going forward - people (their Lifestreams) acting as the online information filter. Why is this? Because people will subscribe to people (to Lifestreams) to access information - information that has already been filtered.

Our points are the same, RSS as a technology is thriving, but the paradigm of self-sorting feeds is being pushed aside by services that do it better.


Shifting Momentum

The fact that I can find news more easily using an external source isn’t the only reason that feed subscriptions by individuals are losing momentum. To see the next trend, all you have to do is take a look at the top blogs. Most of them have seen a large influx of traffic in the last several months (fueled by Yahoo! Buzz among other sources) yet their subscriber numbers have been relatively stable. This has a lot to do with the demographic that their new visitors represent, but some of the change comes from the fact that people have a lot more options.

One example would be Techcrunch, which has seen it’s traffic go (according to Compete) from about 200k uniques in July to over 1.3 million uniques. The site’s subscriber numbers have only increased by about 100k in the same period. Even taking into account that Feedburner uses black magic to determine your subscriber numbers — based in part on the number of people who open their feed readers on a particular day, and the fact that many of the Techcrunch’s “subscribers” received their subscriptions through bundles, the increase, if it was proportional, seems like it should be larger.

If you look across Social Media more broadly, however, you will see that Techcrunch has picked up tens of thousands of friends on Twitter and Friendfeed, all of whom I’d say are just as valuable as any feed subscriber.

If I don’t like RSS, I can use news sites like Digg. If I don’t like that, I can use bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us. I have dozens of ways to “subscribe” to blogs and most of these provide much better sorting than any feed reader out there.

This is a very good thing, but like all good things there is a downside to this shift. RSS subscriptions are still used as a primary indicator of your blog’s value, even though they are now harder to get than ever before. As it stands, advertisers don’t care how many twitter friends you have, or how many people have bookmarked your posts on Delicious. They have no solid numbers to measure how entrenched your blog is in the culture other than traffic and subscribers — which means that instead of looking at every method of content distribution equally, many content creators focus their attention of gaining subscribers, ignoring more valuable channels.

I don’t really care how you get to my content and I never have. I think a lot of bloggers who are experiencing this shift feel the same way. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re reading on-site, in your reader, in Toluu or Friendfeed — all that really matters is that the message finds its way to you.

Which leads to my final question. How relevant do you think feed subscribers numbers really are? Do you use them to determine the value of a site or are they just one notch on a much more complicated measuring stick?

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  • del.icio.us
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