Why Yahoo is Backing Away from RSS

Has anyone noticed that Yahoo's love affair with RSS seems to be withering? In 2004 and 2005 Yahoo was all over feeds. It was an early leader in driving adoption, as a matter of fact. But in recent months I question whether they remain committed to RSS as a platform.

This is more than conjecture. 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.

First, think of the lost opportunity here. The food site should have an RSS feed for recipes. The TV site could have streamed programming listings with feeds. And the advertising site should take all of those great insights they're now getting from the ANA and package them into feeds. What's worse is the advertising site has podcasts that you can't even subscribe to! (See comments - you can subscribe to the podcasts)

All of this is a bit of a head scratcher. Why is Yahoo, a site that had been an ardent promoter of RSS, now seemingly putting it all on the back burner? They shipped three heavily promoted sites without feeds. This isn't an oversight. It's deliberate. Something bigger is going on here.

My gut feeling is that Yahoo is trying to create content that you can only get on their sites and nowhere else. It's all very Lloyd Braun. They want consumers spending as much time as possible on their properties. If they put RSS feeds on these sites, it will mean fewer page views because people will only click in on content that they really care about. In other words, it means less time spent. Browsing and clicking creates page views. By skipping RSS, they will serve up more ads.

Could this be the beginning of a larger trend?

::Later: more from Rafat Ali on Yahoo's eyeball strategy and from W.B. Macnamara, who reminds us that the media is still all about pageviews.

Comments

[ed]

The advertising podcast can be subscribed to:
http://advertising.yahoo.com/podcast/audio/rss2.0.xml

There just isn't an RSS feed button on the site. It shows up in the Firefox location bar with the RSS icon, though.

[Whitney McNamara]

Funny you should mention that...just yesterday I posted The Internet called: it wants its pageviews back.

While the Yahoo examples that you're talking about are different from the ones that I looked at (and seem to point in a different direction for Yahoo), it does seem like there may be a broader push towards building good old-fashioned pageview counts in response to some of what's happening on the Web.

[threz]

I don't think they really "get" RSS, or at least those sub-sites aren't getting it.

The key to driving RSS traffic to any site isn't just to put all the content in there, what people want from feeds is a summary of the article itself, ie. put the headline in the Title and a catchy summary in the Description of each article, and don't forget to add an image if possible.

Publishers should realise (and most do) that RSS drives people to sites that they wouldn't normally visit.

(btw. Steve, you couldn't make the comments textarea wider could you? :-)

[Russell Page]

1 - Because RSS is overrated in it's actual use

2 - Because Yahoo! is being smart about this. People go to web sites for the experience and not just the information. RSS only delivers the information.

[Steve Rubel]

Threz, next time I redesign my blog. In the meantime, use this. It works like a charm.

[Janet & Edgar]

I don't think RSS is overrated. My efficiency improves with RSS b/c:

- my email box is cleaner (no need to subscribe to newsletters or other email format)

- I'm automatically fed content that's relevant or interesting to me. I get to browse and select what I want to read.

If creators want consumers to view more pages, they should create relevant and interesting content.

[Isaac]

I guess they are losing confidence on RSS by analyzing user's behaviors. however, they may forgot the Atom adoption by Google and the new RSS service like Anothr.com which can make really like "feeding"

[Sameer]

Re: A larger trend
I doubt it. Yahoo is in a unique position though, given its user base.

My take is that Yahoo realizes that the rest of us (outside of Silicon Valley/Alley and those not in the information business) primarily rely on MyYahoo and Yahoo properties that come out of the box via partnerships with ATT Broadband, Yahoo Mail, etc. If they can make their vertical and start page properties more meaty in terms of content, they probably figure there's no need to loose the consumer to an RSS Reader where Yahoo content is going to get equal footing at best, vis a vis competing content.

They could also be quietly validating whether users are really up in arms about not having RSS. Its a little early to tell but so far, other than sporadic uproars in the blogsphere, this decision hasn't really come back to bite them. RSS needs to be way more transparent and easy to adopt for the everyday (Yahoo) user. And so until Yahoo! Food's target audience isn't relying on RSS - keep 'em coming back to a yahoo.com domain.

As much as I am a huge RSS advocate and I do think that RSS should be on these sites, you can't fault them for stopping the presses to evaluate where RSS or syndication makes sense vis a vie a given target audience.

[andre taliercio]

I agree with thez, news/titles derived from RSS feeds are supposed to catch your attention and then drive you to the site. In any case it is difficult to fight convenience. So they probably don't get it. Nothing new here.

[Sam]

I think its twofold. It does reduce page views if its adopted, but overall the adoption rate is still *so low* its near impossible to convince muckety mucks that its worth the development time/money to implement. (and it drives no revenue) I'd bet they thought it was an interesting experiment and think it won't ever go mainstream. I think its used a lot more in back end content sharing/affiliate relationships than with consumers.

[Marshall Kirkpatrick]

Seems particularly strange given the huge numbers on My.Yahoo for RSS use.

[pwb]

Zero chance it's due to some reasoned cost/value analysis wrt page views.

Russell Page gets it: RSS is over-rated, especially for non-personal blog content.

[The New Guy]

I think you're not taking in to consideration the product development lifecycle. The products are designed as web destinations, not data delivery conduits. RSS is an afterthought. As you reach your launch deadline, anything not a P1 priority gets left on the cutting-room floor to be picked up in a second or 3rd phase release.

[Jeremy Zawodny]

*sigh*

I'd be careful to generalize from these examples. But it certainly does look like we're sending mixed messages.

I'll see if I can bug someone about that...

[The Hoff]

Mmmmm... walled-garden...

[Jeremy Zawodny]

Oh, FWIW confab.yahoo.com has RSS feeds and it launched today. :-)

[Steve Rubel]

Jeremy, thanks. That's because confab is a site for geeks developed by geeks. The others are developed for the mainstream to be sold to marketers and therefore in need of pageviews. There's the rub.

[David Scott Lewis]

Steve, you know that I think the world of you. And, I agree with your analysis: Eyeballs are everything.

But there's a general trend that you may be missing. Although all of us geeks love RSS feeds, most people still prefer to receive information via e-newsletters. This is simply a fact that cannot be ignored. Maybe YOUR readers prefer RSS, but when put to a side-by-side circulation comparison, e-newsletters beat RSS for most publications.

In the case of Yahoo per se, if e-mail isn't an option either, then it has to be about eyeballs and time spent on a particular site. But don't be surprised if RSS feeds become the best distribution medium for extremely important or newsworthy items via tickers and the like (e.g, Google Web Clips or the Firefox RSS Ticker add-on) with e-mail continuing to be the preferred distribution medium for all other current awareness. Most important news: RSS feeds. Everything else (maybe 90+% of the current awareness services used by most people): E-mail rules.

[Steve Rubel]

David, I totally agree with you. The funny thing about the Internet is that some habits change quickly, others are slow. Email news seems to be in the latter camp.

[Adam Saunders]

RSS tools are not sophisticated enough to make feed reading useful. I've tried all the readers and found that RSS did not save me time or keep me more up to date.

RSS reading and Delicious became a huge waste of my time, so I killed them and reverted to just using my Firefox bookmarks again. Now all my information is in one place and easily accessible.

I came full circle, and I think Yahoo did too. When RSS is useful I'll start using it again.

[Jianing]

Either a) Yahoo is dumb and doesn't get RSS, or b) someone at Yahoo looked at the RSS usage data they've accumulated and decided not offering it is a better choice for them. I'd say b) is more likely to be true.

People who haven't studied millions of users' behavior shouldn't be too confident when making statements.

[Jeff Birkeland]

fyi..Yahoo! Tech feeds (the site launched in May) are here:

http://tech.yahoo.com/ri

[Mike Abundo]

Yahoo's refocusing on its target market: n00bs. N00bs don't get RSS.

[Sean O'Donnell]

Given that yahoo pretty much drove the development of mrss, I would say its a bit much to claim they "dont get" rss. I would imagine the move is deliberate and they have their reasons, even if they may be misguided

[nalts]

On a similar note, YouTube forces you back to its site to read the comments you get on your videos. It would be extremely easy to push the comment via e-mail. Instead, it sends you an e-mail with a link to the comment.

The trick is a balance between advertising realities and consumer satisfaction. Move too far either direction and you're inviting a competitor or leaving money on the table.

[Olivier D. alias ze kat]

About this sentence :
"My gut feeling is that Yahoo is trying to create content that you can only get on their sites and nowhere else. It's all very Lloyd Braun. They want consumers spending as much time as possible on their properties. If they put RSS feeds on these sites, it will mean fewer page views because people will only click in on content that they really care about."

Perhaps Yahoo! take this way because they don't give good tools to subscribe and read RSS.

I prefer spend time on Google Reader against navigation menus from sources :o|

I hate the f*** common RSS storage between Y!Mail, My Yahoo! and Y! News Ticker... I don't need to read sames sources while I use Mail or my StartPage :o|

And we need TRUE aggregator, not somes simples reader features.

[Paul Fabretti]

Does anyone think it is any wonder why both Yahoo and Microsoft put so much invesrtment into creating wonderful Ajax-based email systems?

Unless I'm missing something, they are not capable of being integrated into any "offline" software ensuring page views online.

Was it really all about an enhanced user-experience? I think not. Like RSS, offline email software reduced page views and reduced revenue! Simple.

[Eric]

At this point in time, I can't think of any web site that I can be bothered checking for updates. It's simply not worth it, just to see the same articles that were there last time.

So in short, if it's a content site that I can't subscribe to, odds are I'll never visit it again. It's a breeze to have 60 feeds, it's impossible to check 60 sites every day. Not publishing a feed drops the number of pageviews they'll get from me to near zero.

That said: this stuff *clearly* is not being targeted at geeks, and RSS adoption among non-geeks is still near zero. So I can see why RSS features would get de-prioritized for these sorts of products.

Yahoo may have it's flaws, but I think they're smarter than to pursue a walled garden at this point.

[Astralis]

One thing that I don't see anyone mentioning is the value of scan-reading, which is how visitors get their news -- they don't have to read the articles to get the news. AFP and the Belgian newspapers are furious at Google News from taking people away from scanning their sites yet using their journalists to fill their content.

If content providers do remove RSS then there's nothing to aggregate and it forces the eyeballs back to their pages (of course Google doesn't use RSS but the issue is the same). That's their hope and if major players do that, such as newspapers and wires, then they hope they can control where people get information and gain the rewards for attracting scan-readers again.

[Marc]

Hahaha, and you mention this as the sign of an internet company with a promising future. RSS is just getting to the point of where it can begin to bank. Yahoo need to pull their collective head out. Their content is fluffier than lemon merengue and they are trying to turn these sites into the basic cable channels that people try to avoid by getting off the couch and online. They can't integrate any aquisitions worth a flip and they only aquire Web 2.0 geek toys that will never bank. Actually they could have aquired so many profitable companies that people actually use for the price they paid for all that Web 2.0 cripe. I think their last earnings statement with regard to advertising revenue says it all about the approach they have been taking.

[Spud]

It would be a shame to see this "trend" be taken up by other sites. I'm a great supporter of RSS and have subscribed to so many feeds I have lost count. Will sites that don't have RSS feeds see a user backlash?

[Cédric]

Hi,
there is another point of vue : Yahoo buys content at the moment. The providers for this content don't want that Yahoo uses RSS feeds, because it will create "noise" around their content (with all these websites who just put rss feeds and google ads).

ps : sorry for my english - I'm french ;o)

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