RSS is a negative revenue generator. Every person that uses it is one less person that will see ads. It's great for users but not sites. I suspect Google was losing a lot of ad revenue so they mostly killed support.
I ignored it for a long time but decided to start using. Unfortunately that's when website support started to decline. Shame I really liked it.
Unless a site chooses to make RSS, especially full content feeds, part of a subscriber benefit. Ars Technica, for example, provides full content feeds to subscribers, while the general public can access title + preview snippets.
Approaching it this way (similar to paid mailing lists) is the best of both worlds, providing revenue incentives to users while removing site ads for users who care about and pay for the content.
True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea. Maybe it will be possible in the future as people get used to the idea of paying for content.
Do you know how Ars Technica does it? Is there some personalized URL to the suscriber feed? I imagine those are pretty easily shared among a group of people?
If website provides accurate article titles and summaries (not clickbait), clicks from RSS feed should land more quality visitors. And if website treats their visitors fairly, by showing decent ads related to content, they increase chance for a click on banner. Website could even show different type of banner for visitors coming from RSS feed, as RSS users are more technical minded.
The article talks about the unfriendly way a raw RSS feed is presented in the browser and how users do not know what to do with it.
This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the top of the RSS XML. The stylesheet not only contains HTML markup to format the XML in a friendly manner, but can also be used to inform the user what to actually do with the RSS feed.
I also had this come across my feed. Always funny to see articles about the death of RSS in my RSS reader. Honestly, the idea of using the web _without_ RSS is entirely alien to me at this point; I don't understand how people keep track of what they've read, what they're going to read, what they liked, etc. without a feed.
It was fantastic for the readers, but it did not have a sustainable businessmodel for the producers. Not enough eyeballs on the actual add stuffed sites when you can just grab the content straight.
So Google set out to absolutely dominate the the RSS client space with their free Reader. They succeeded, then just terminated the product. And that was for many the end of the line.
I have loads of RSS feeds and I almost universally use them as notifications to go and see the post on the full site.
Most RSS readers I'm aware of prominently include an option to view the full page, often inside the same app (and these apps are less likely to have content-blocking add-ons installed, which would block lucrative surveillance).
I'm quite happy for RSS feeds to include only a summary/thumbnail/excerpt plus a link to the full page.
Still following a lot of RSS feeds aggregated with Feedly. I don’t know any better way to follow a lot of sites (don’t mention fb, twitter or any other social network, those are not for this…)
Google managed to dominate it, then cancelled Google Reader, taking audiences away; just as they did with Usenet (DejaNews). Corrupt antitrust authorities didn't help, nor did it help with Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, nor with Facebook acquiring WhatsApp. That's what happened.
I rediscovered RSS earlier this year when I turned over day to day responsibility for marketing (was managing both product and marketing) to a new manager. All of our marketing tools (website, email, etc...) supported RSS, and to my surprise, a lot of third party sites I like to monitor turned out the have a <link> tag with RSS or atom feeds. I did a quick apt search for rss and realized that akregator is still around, set it up, and now I can keep up with all the content the marketing team (and our competition) is cranking out in few minutes.
Readit News
I ignored it for a long time but decided to start using. Unfortunately that's when website support started to decline. Shame I really liked it.
Approaching it this way (similar to paid mailing lists) is the best of both worlds, providing revenue incentives to users while removing site ads for users who care about and pay for the content.
This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the top of the RSS XML. The stylesheet not only contains HTML markup to format the XML in a friendly manner, but can also be used to inform the user what to actually do with the RSS feed.
The BBC do exactly this on all their RSS feeds.
I think that only works for Firefox, since I can't recall Chrome ever doing the right thing in that setup
I feel like RSS dipped, but actually has rebounded a bit in the recent 5-ish years.
Deleted Comment
All the things that make it clean, simple and attractive to the tech inclined are precisely the reason why it is in decline.
So Google set out to absolutely dominate the the RSS client space with their free Reader. They succeeded, then just terminated the product. And that was for many the end of the line.
Most RSS readers I'm aware of prominently include an option to view the full page, often inside the same app (and these apps are less likely to have content-blocking add-ons installed, which would block lucrative surveillance).
I'm quite happy for RSS feeds to include only a summary/thumbnail/excerpt plus a link to the full page.