The joys and pains of RSS.

For years, there has been a lengthy debate going on in multiple media companies about how best to handle that little orange box known as Really Simple Syndication. If you don't know what RSS is, you probably won't finish this article, but just in case: RSS is a method that Web publishers use to push material to readers who've signed up to receive it. Like an e-mail newsletter, it allows readers to know what's on a blog or Web site without actually visiting the site; instead, they use one of many RSS readers to look at an aggregate of sites sending them RSS feeds.

Like many facets of Web publishing, RSS presents obvious opportunities, some less obvious but real headaches, and a big chunk of unknown. It's instructive for me to go back to an article I edited in 2004; written by TBM contributor Matthew Yeomans for Time Europe, it's a remarkable reminder of how little about RSS has changed in five years. Yes, RSS is hugely more available today. But the two big questions—will RSS ever really go mainstream? and can Web publishers find a way to make money with RSS?—still lack definitive answers.

No one can say with certainty how many Web readers use RSS; an October 2008 Forrester report put the number at 11 percent, which feels roughly right to me. Why haven't more Web users adopted RSS? For some, despite the word "simple" in the title, RSS is too complicated. For others, it might be alienating and clunky. I remember being pretty excited a few years back when I first started using MyYahoo. After a while, though, I found that it just didn't work very well. Some blog posts would show up four or five hours after they were posted; some would never show up. Was this the fault of the reader or the publisher providing the RSS feed? Who knows—but the more important question is: How motivated is a busy person to find out, then fix every instance? For me and I suspect millions of others, the answer is: Not very.

There may, of course, be good reasons to provide a service even if only a small percentage of your readers use it. Not every New York Times reader does the crossword puzzle, but to stop publishing it would send paying readers away. And so The Big Money allows (here my publisher would like me to say "strongly encourages!") readers to sign up for RSS feeds sliced in a variety of ways: all stories, individual blogs, most-read stories, etc.

That's not to say we've solved the crucial question of what readers want from RSS. The conventional RSS feed was effectively a headline service, forcing readers to click through to the actual Web site or blog. This makes sense to publishers, for whom traffic is a kind of religion. But there is also the option of offering the full text of articles and blog posts via the RSS readers. Many publishers reflexively reject this option for fear that it would stop readers coming to the site.

More than any writer I can think of, financial blogger Felix Salmon (now on Reuters.com) has argued vociferously against this view. You can read his argument here and here, but let me summarize it as a logical sequence. Web publishers want bloggers to link to their stories to drive traffic. Bloggers are heavy, disproportionate users of RSS feeds. Bloggers can more easily find content of interest via a full-feed RSS, rather than having to click through on hundreds of headlines. Ergo, publishers should offer full feeds.

Is he right? It's a tricky thesis to prove either way. But based on this site's experience, I can't make the case that he's wrong. Earlier this year, TBM moved from a headline RSS to a full feed. Jing Gu, our tireless director of technology, tells me that satisfying the needs of active bloggers was a crucial consideration in that decision. And, certainly, TBM traffic is up dramatically since the beginning of the year—not to say that's because of the full-feed RSS, but no one here holds the opinion that it has hurt us.

Of course, it's more complicated than that. No sooner did we switch then we got a complaint from a reader (only one, though) saying that she prefers the quick browsing experience of the headline feed; people whose goal is to find stories to post to sites like Digg and Reddit apparently agree. For this reason, our sister site Double X began offering the option of either headline or full feed when it launched in May. The numbers there are too preliminary to draw any firm conclusions, but it's safe to say that readers seem to like to have the choice.

Then there is the question of monetization. There are clearly benefits to knowing the habits of your RSS readers, and obviously putting your material in front of an RSS subscriber makes that person more likely to read you again. But those are steps toward monetization; the real revenue potential is theoretically in advertising. Here again, the full feed would appear to have an advantage, because it offers more space in which to put an ad. More and more sites are moving away from Google's Feedburner toward RSS services that allow publishers to control how often ads will appear in what kind of feeds. They apparently have a track record of providing revenue this way.

Hurray. It's still kind of uncharted territory, though, and there's a risk that readers may not like ads in RSS feeds. All told, I'd say that the track record of RSS is pretty mixed. It's a very useful tool for a relatively small number of readers, and no serious Web publisher can afford not to offer it. But I suspect that before RSS truly revolutionizes the use of the Web, something else will come along to surpass it.