Payola makes the world go around
The world go around
The world go around
Payola makes the world go around
It makes the world go ’round.

All I have replaced is the word “money” with the word “payola” because not all forms of payola are monetary or immediately obvious, but it certainly can have huge value.

Feed readers and Ajax desktops get a huge amount of coverage on many popular tech blogs, probably a lot more so than any other online service. Every minor update to a major RSS platform gets coverage, and hell, I am not immune to this either.

There is a huge benefit in people creating accounts on multiple feedreaders, only to discard them at a later date. The feeds are still being pulled for your account, even if you haven’t logged into it for the last 6 months, and those subscriber numbers are still being reported to Feedburner.

But major blogs there is some additional payola that almost guarantees additional coverage

Default Subscriber Packages

Yes, I am jealous…

Not every feed reader service provides “suggested reading” and default packages, but many do, and it certainly has an effect on subscriber numbers for the major blogs.

Does something like this have an effect on coverage?

I wonder what percentage of subscriptions come from such default subscription packages…

Google Reader currently has a huge market share, and doesn’t provide default subscription options. A lot of those subscribers are created by extensive coverage on Tech blogs, converting people over to Google Reader, or at least encouraging people to test out other services.

There seems to be a huge disparity between subscriber growth rate for those included in such default packages, and those who are not.

Duplicity

This is a fun concept…

Tech sites frequently discuss market share for feed readers. They frequently compare numbers of their own subscribers by providing screenshots of their subscriber numbers.

Obviously it is important to figure as prominently as possible on such a list, so it makes huge financial sense to include the most prominent tech blogs within the default subscriber packages, even if more of your users would most likely be interested in a knitting blog or parenting.

Surely this should be something disclosed when talking about RSS applications?

Techcrunch via Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim (who has a disclosure policy)

p.s. Don’t forget to add me to your Bloglines account, even if you use Google Reader, Pageflakes or Netvibes

Update: I need to make a small correction

There is payola with Google Reader too!

I would like to thank Mike for pointing this out in the comments.

Update2: I used Google Reader’s search function for blogs related to marketing. It is a terrible search feature and there are countless marketing blogs of high quality that are totally missing from the results.

MyFeedz Sucks as a Feed Reader

To qualify that, let me show you the “user experience” I went though, and how amazingly let down I felt having given it some of my time.

When I first logged in, this supposedly intelligent RSS Reader presented me with a selection of articles possibly based upon analysis of my own blog.
So I imported the OPML from my Google Reader Account.

After importing this is what I was presented with to read

I think at this time I should point out that none of those articles are from my OPML file, and possibly one is relevant to what I sometimes read, but that is on an article directory rather than a blog.

So I tried refining things a little:-

There are the tags that were defined for me to start with

These are the tags that MyFeedz suggests that I pick from. By selecting a few, and then refreshing the display, slowly a few more tags appear, that might even refer to specific blogs I read every day. Also note that at this time they hadn’t imported all my OPML, just a small cross section.

The front page view didn’t change – the stories being listed in the main panel were not from my selected feeds. The only thing related to my OPML were excerpts in the sidebar. Most of the feeds in my OPML file are full content, so only receiving a small selection and just excerpts wasn’t useful. I wasn’t getting what I wanted to read.

So I left MyFeedz for a while and went to write about something else…

A few hour later I received an email from MyFeedz stating that they have processed all my feeds from my OPML. As I am writing this, it is a day later, so in theory they have had plenty of time to work out what I read, and grab the feeds.

MyFeedz Session 2 – Based on Full OPML Results

First of all here are all the tags I now have selected. It doesn’t cover everything, because as an example I read a lot about WordPress Plugins, and I haven’t been given that option.
Who knows, maybe it will give me a selection of the blogs I want to read.

As far as I am concerned, MyFeedz were successful in creating a…

Total Disaster

Here is my new front page

Only one of the blogs on my front page is in my OPML file, and the article listed is 3 days old.

You can however get a little more personalized if you go tag exploring.

Tag Exploring

With tags you can select only your subscribed feeds, and sort by both date and relevance.
Browsing your tags is extremely slow – I am not talking unresponsive or a little laggy – I am talking click a tag and then switch tabs to do something else for a while – infuriatingly slow.

It is actually so unresponsive that it is preventing me doing a complete review.

A tag view lists posts that in some way were tagged or related to that term, so maybe a domain name. Occasionally it also offers some meme like features (think Techmeme or Megite) with links to related posts.

Tag searching seems to have just ground to a halt, so no screenshot will be forthcoming.

I currently can’t see a use for MyFeedz – it isn’t a Feed Reader – no river of news, no way to mark what you have read, no way to read a specific blog, and no way that I can see to look at the history.
It can’t compete with a meme tracker… especially for speed to find out the hot discussions in a particular niche. If you want a meme of your own OPML, take Megite for a spin.
As for specific keywords or tags, you are far better off using Technorati or Google Blogsearch.

Sharing

Robert mentioned sharing in his writeup – there is a way to share with MyFeedz. There are RSS feeds for each tag, and while you are reading you can add a tag to something, so you could use personal tags as thus create a shared feed of your selections.
The problem is I am not sure you would want to share something you haven’t read, thus you will end up having to click through to every site before you share something… extremely frustrating.

For Niche Marketing

It is another source for creating tag based RSS feeds that you can feed to content sites on autopilot, thus I am sure many people will find a use for it ;)

Yesterday it was announced that Google have managed to untangle their various crawlers and can now report feed usage stats to services like Feedburner. Further coverage on Techcrunch, Mashable, SearchEngineLand and Techmeme.

FeedBurner Readership Prior to Inclusion of Google Reader Stats

It is unfortunate that I don’t have screen captures of all of the following, although I am sure the specific sites I mention will be reporting their own data shortly.

Techcrunch – from memory had between 150k and 170k subscribers being reported
Mashable – from memory had approximately 51k subscribers

For my own stats it is much easier because I have a FeedBurner Pro account

“Reach” currently seems to correspond with how many clicks you have on the site, and not how many unique readers or how many page views on the site.

Here are my MyBlogLog stats from the same day:-

FeedBurner Readership After Inclusion of Google Reader Stats

Techcrunch

Whilst my estimate of previous reported subscribers might be out by 10K, overnight Techcrunch have gained approximately 100K subscribers. This is close to a 60% gain

Mashable

Mashable seem to have gained around 10K subscribers, or approximately a 20% gain

Andy Beard

In this case I have more detailed information

The addition of Google Reader Stats represents a 32% gain

Conclusions

There seems to be a huge variation in the demographics for each site which is actually very refreshing. Techcrunch obviously have a very high population of Google Reader subscribers, and they have given Google Reader significant coverage. Mashable have also given Google Reader significant coverage, but their readership is potentially different, with more emphasis on social networks, and potentially a younger audience.

My own site is relatively new, and also caters for a different demographic audience, of people relatively new to blogging, and also a lot of people who are less familiar with reading RSS feeds.

Whilst the information I have isn’t conclusive, and such figures might only be forthcoming if Feedburner aggregate their statistics and make them public, it seems to me that Google Reader may well have the largest user base in the Feed Reader market, less than 6 months after they updated their user interface.
Google Reader certainly seems very popular among new adopters, and that is actually the largest potential market.

I am not alone in drawing these conclusions, as it seems Steve Boyd and Jeremy Wright (B5 Media) have reported similar gains.

With B5 media it will be interesting which properties gained the most overnight. I have a similar but slightly different demographic to Problogger.net.
Darrens subscribers seem to have shot up by more than the average for B5 Media – Before the Google Reader statistics were introduced, Darren had quite significant gains in readership, and was approaching close to 12K readers.

He is now approaching 19K subscribers:-

This is close to a 60% gain overnight

Jeremy also gave a very interesting breakdown of the top subscription method by each demographic audience:-

One of the great things, though, is that we can actually break these numbers down by some vertical-specific info. I won’t do this for all our channels, but to give a brief view into some different demo/psycho-graphics, here are 3 of our largest channels with their top 3 feed readers:

Business: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Technology: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Entertainment: Firefox Live Bookmarks, Google Desktop, Google Feedfetcher

And a few of our smaller channels, with diverse interests?

Arts & Crafts: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, My Yahoo
Personal Development: Google Feedfethcer, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Travel & Culture: Bloglines, Google Feedfetcher, unidentified (followed by Firefox Live Bookmarks)

I wonder if other blog networks will be so open with their information, as I find this fascinating, especially the lack of IE7 users in Jeremy’s stats, despite its supposed lead over Firefox.

I should also link over to the Feedburner blog, because they explain how their statistics work.

Update 06/25/2007

Duncan Riley just linked through to this post in an article on Techcrunch, so I thought it would be appropriate to make a small update.

The initial stats listed above are from 4 months ago, lets see how things have changed.

The obvious thing looking at the follow statistics is that my subscriber base has more than doubled, in fact I could claim my number of subscribers is growing faster than Techcrunch!

The fact that Techcrunch gain more subscribers per day than I have in total is just a minor issue of very little importance.

Among my own readership, Google Reader’s market share has actually increased to 38%, and because my subscriber base has increased, those numbers are now from a bigger market sample, though admittedly still a very heavy technology focus.

I should also note that those numbers are not influenced at all by default subscription packages from many feed readers, which can have a dramatic effect on subscriber number balance and the total number of active subscribers that are reported.

Om Malik recent was taking a look at Rojo from a traffic perspective. What he didn’t touch on, although he did refer to a previous post, was that the Rojo page was actually a very poor quality splog.

This is the page he linked to

With the pages being indexed and monetized, that would make Rojo a splog by many people’s terminology, in fact most.

In many ways Rojo are not even giving correct attribution for content that they might be able to use commercially, because they are not citing sources very well in the eyes of the search engines.
Here is an example link, showing how they are using a redirect:-

http://www.rojo.com/title/Q_PxEfMKb3QYI-Hp/WWg3sx9hbJ4MHCup/1169252114/http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FOmMalik%2F%7E3%2F78197566%2F

It should be noted that the link points to Feedburner, but I assume GigaOm has a pro account with Feedburner that might do some kind of SEO friendly redirect.

It is possible that the Rojo link is also being followed, but it is a little hard to check. It is certainly not a “clean link”.

As an example here is a Yahoo search

The page itself contains 3 Adsense adverts, so Rojo, owned by Six Apart, are monetizing other people’s full feed content, and not even giving a reliable backlink so that search engines can work out the original source.

From what I remember, at least Bitacle gave you a back link.

My opinion – this method of gaming MyBlogLog is useless and pointless. SoloSeo has gained some nice linkbait from the article, but very few new community members. It is a bit like Jason Calacanis and his gaming Alexa experiment. Sure it can be done, but what is really the point?

Update: Andy Beal has pointed out that Michael might have been using a dummy account for his testing. If he was, that was a sign of the professional way to test out “grey” stuff.

If you really want to game MyBlogLog, the tactics mentioned in my “MyBlogLog Plutoed” post do work, but are not entirely ethical.

Jim Kukral has been commenting on Don Dodge’s analysis of the MyBlogLog purchase.

I don’t agree with Don’s figures. I expect MyBlogLog to have 500,000 users within 6 months based on all the positive feedback the service is gaining. I am just one user of MyBlogLog, they already have 2 paid subscriptions from me. Do you know how easy it would be to turn MyBlogLog into a “Social RSS Reader” ?
It is not just the services already available, but those that could be introduced in the future.
As someone mentioned in Don’s comments, IP (Intellectual Property) might also play a huge role in the valuation.

I do have other stats packages running, but hopefully the MyBlogLog stats will improve. One thing I would love is to be able to sort by most recent referral. I have also previously mentioned things like RSS feeds. It is not a major factor now, but it will be in the future.

Update:

Loren Baker has a nice overview of the potential synergies between Yahoo and MyBlogLog. It is important to note that MyBlogLog is being kept as a seperate entity. Sure the data will be useful, but I don’t expect total integration unless MyBlogLog themselves decide to do a mashup. Hmm mashup – MyBlogLog could turn into a very useful start page providing its own RSS feeds.

You can easily achieve what you want with Google Reader, as it is possible to share tags.

The following is IMHO (in my honest opinion) and IANAL (I am not a lawyer)

It would be advisable you choose your content extremely carefully based on the copyright of the fed items.
Only use sources you can trust to own 100% rights to the material they publish. If they are using licensed content, either articles or images, refeeding content might be a copyright issue.

If you do offer republished feeds, you need to decide to use full content or only excerpts. Just because a feed is provided in full for a reader, might not mean the owner of the content supports the use of the full feed content for another website.

I have read even Google pay companies for syndicated content. Why shouldn’t you have to respect copyright as well?

Should your refeed be indexed by the search engines? You don’t want it to be regarded as a splog.

If you intend to undertake refeeding, I would also suggest you should do it from a feed reader that is not your primary reader. There are lots of services that provide RSS feeds of personal data, and it might cause problems if you refed content you didn’t want to, or even worse, information you were privy to, but was not public knowledge.

Be very careful if you decide to monetise the site where the content is eventually published, as even a link through to your primary domain could be looked on as commercial.

When I first discussed the problem with sharing content with Google Reader, it was pretty much ignored.

My second post on this subject did receive some more attention, notably Robert Scoble, and I would like to thank him for at least opening up some discussion on the subject.

I have been accused of being “RSS Police”, when in fact I am looking for some controls to be introduced to determine the way content can be shared, that would actually make the arguement for RSS Syndication stronger, not weaker.

Now I have mentioned Mike Filsaime’s Death of Internet Marketing Report. I used an affiliate link, why throw money away if someone is willing to pay you to send them traffic for a free report? I did very clearly disclose it was an affiliate link, and the amount I expected to earn from my recommendation wouldn’t even cover the cost of writing a single paragraph about it.

So here is another link to the report, this time it is straight to the primary domain. I make no money from this link, and I can only track it through Google Analytics. (If you click it in an RSS reader, I will never know)

The Death of Internet Marketing

Here is a link I make one buck from. It also gives me an indication that at least people click on the link.

From that data I know that 14 people clicked my original link, and only one person was smart enough to sign up and possibly read a report that could change the way they look on copyright and RSS feeds.

That is SAD!

I spent probably more than an hour writing my original recommendation to read the report, those 14 people obviously hadn’t read it, but only 1 person was willing to give their email address.

I am spending much more than an hour again to encourage you to download it. I don’t have a massive readership, and some might have already read the report (I really hope so).

I am spending this time to help those 13 people who clicked through last time, but for some reason didn’t trust my recommendation.

My reason for promoting the ebook was nothing really to do with making one buck, or the cyclic nature of marketing. I have experienced that for years in the computer games industry, and even Mike’s “Skulls concept” is very similar to a developer/publisher relationship for games development.

Mike might release the report in the future in a way that doesn’t require an email address. Then again, releasing reports into “the wild” without some method of following up and making corrections might be looked on as irresponsible. Actually he has made some changes since the initial release (mainly typographic), the report is up to version 1.4 now.

Don’t forget to also read the Paypal Report, it is a good read.

The Ideal Way to Deliver Such Content

RSS is a way to deliver content that a user chooses to subscribe to. There is no way to spam your RSS Reader.

However publishers of content need some way to suggest content shouldn’t be shared, or possibly prevent it being shared. After all, some content you are expected to pay for.

RSS Authentication is sufficient to protect the original source of content. We just now need a way for the copyright of content to be respected.

I can’t think of any business that promoted an easy way to share email with your friends.

Once RSS can be labelled as private, then innovators will be encouraged to offer a feed-burner like service for subscribing to private content, either by RSS, or a gateway to email.

Readers of the content would have enhanced privacy, with the option to unsubscribe at any time, and even with email delivery, the provider of the content wouldn’t need personal information unless payment was required.

The Danger in a Growing Trend

Can you afford to defend yourself against a DMCA claim? Some services might be able to claim “safe harbour”. I am not sure that would apply for individuals.

Please refer to previous articles with possible solutions for sharing RSS via reblogging, and also suggestions on how feeds could be protected in some way. Make sure you read the comments as well.

I hope the time I have invested in writing this post proves worthwhile, mainly for those 13 people who are scared to give their email address to someone.

p.s. the email subscription to this blog is with Feedburner, and totally private. All I receive is vague open rate statistics, and not access to your email address.

A private subscription service for text, audio and video content, even involving a paid subscription fee has been possible for more than a year, based upon RSS.

In a recent podcast Robert Scobles interviewed the Google Reader team, where they made clear that from the start, one of the primary features of Google Reader was the sharing of your private RSS feeds. This is with total disregard for the intended private use of the RSS content.

Some background

For years email marketing has been plagued by spam filters. Whilst they become more accurate in detecting spam content, and allow requested content to be delivered, to effectively use email for marketing, and in some cases even personal messages, you would have to use an email service such as Aweber or Getresponse to ensure your content was delivered.
RSS guarantees 100% deliverability, and because of the way RSS is delivered, it is possible to include rich multimedia content within the messages. Delivering HTML email currently is much harder than text, and there are multiple compatibility problems with different email clients, both offline and online.
RSS will soon become integrated within our daily working environments, as an equivalent to email within Windows Vista, and online applications such as Gmail and their Google Reader.

RSS Technology being Destroyed

(before it has a chance to succeed)

One good example is Feed Magic. I have been a supporter of Feed Magic for more than a year, I own a license for the script itself, and a subscription to the service.

I am an affiliate for the product, and if you decide to purchase their product, I will recieve compensation. But that is not the primary reason for this post.

But can I effectively use them as intended?

Increasingly the answer is an unfortunate… no!

I can’t use what I paid for effectively, and that is the primary reason for this post.

The more indiscriminate sharing of RSS is being encouraged, the less chance break-through technology (that would revolutionise the delivery of marketing messages and vital support information) has of succeeding.

The Google representitives in the podcast actively encouraged the sharing of linkblogs.

I freely admit that the potential of Feed Magic is in its future. It has so much potential.

It should be noted that the RSS options provided by Aweber and Getresponse are nowhere near as advanced as Feedmagic. You could achieve their RSS features just by feeding your own blog with the content from your autoresponder by email.

RSS is subscribing to content you want. There is no way to spam your RSS box. If you decide you don’t want the content, you can unsubscribe.

So Google in part, with their Google Reader and very clear philosophy in the design of the service, are destroying something that could defeat email spam forever… the potential of RSS.

Robert Scoble had the opportunity to discuss this situation with the Google Reader team. Notice when he commented to my post on Google Reader (I assume he read it, and my reply)

Robert is also still sharing content of his linkblog, without asking the owner of the content permission.

This is just one example of how great web 2.0 software can actually harm rather than promote.

Edit: The Feedmagic site was discontinued – some of the technology might have ended up in Nanacast.

The press and “A” list bloggers have been constantly touting the use of Google Reader over the past few weeks. Overall it is a useful piece of software, and might even become my permanent rss reader in the future.

But the Google reader has major flaws, which noone is really talking about. In fact I have noticed a growing tendancy for reporting thee flaws as a cool feature, without any emphasis on the negative aspects of using these “features”.

Google Reader Flaw 1

The Google Reader doesn’t currently send readership data to services like Feedburner. If you notice your blog readership go down, it is because you have been touting Google Reader too much.

Google Reader Flaw 2

There has been a few mentions of “Linkblogs”, especially by Robert Scoble on his Scobleizer blog most recently here, but also here here and here.

Sharing a link blog privately with a few people, maybe inside a company isn’t going to have a major consequence.

But if 1000s of people subscribe to Robert Scobles linkblog this will have 2 major effects.

1. For Robert himself, his readership could go down, because people will read the main original story, not his commentary. It would be much better to refeed your linkblog somewhere, to at least monitor subscribers, and maybe monetize the feed.
2. For the original publishers, they don’t get subscribers, but they do maybe get more readers if Robert et al decide their posts are significant. You could potentially have 10000 people reading your content (full post content), and have zero subscribers to your own feed.

Google Reader Flaw 3

Link blogs again but in this case link blog abuse and splogs.

Google have taken some precautions with their linkblogs, unlike many services that offer something similar.

A search in Google for Roberts Link Blog will not find it.

Google isn’t even indexing links to Link Blogs

MSN seem to be in the same ballpark, obviously Google had a chat with them

But Google forgot to have a nice chat with Yahoo

Yahoo don’t list any information relating to the contents of the link blogs, which shows they are obeying some directive not to index the pages, such as robots.txt, though more likely something in .htaccess

Thus the shared pages in Google are not in themselves the same as other splogs that have been causing uproar recently, where websites have been taking full feeds, without permission, and monetizing them with adsense. (I don’t worry if people do that with my feeds, as long as the backlinks don’t contain “no follow”)
The major problem is that quite often thse are full content feeds, that publishers wanted read by their subscribers. Many publishers are currently trying to fight sploggers by installing plugins to their blogs, such as the Antileech plugin for wordpress.

The problem is that Antileech is now useless.

No blogger in their right mind is going to block Google from picking up their feeds to serve Google Reader users.

Each Feed can be assigned a tag automatically. The method to do it is not obvious within the interface, but it is possible.

That automatically grabbed feed quite often will have the full contents, and a plugin like Antileech isn’t going to do anything to stop it.

Once you have a feed available, preferably with full contents, it is very easy for someone to use that content on another site, sometimes without permission. There is nothing legally or ethically wrong with the tools used for this. There are plenty of reasons to use such tools ethically, and quite often the professional, designed for the purpose “splogging tools” actually do a more professional job of using and attributing your content than the simple free tools available.

One example of a simple tool is WP-Autoblog . More sophisticated tools can take a series of excerpts, automatically tag the contents based on keywords, substitute links with “deep linking” affiliate links (and yes that is ethical, because the blog ownes wants you to promote his blog and products). An example of such a tool is Blog Auto Publisher(aff). BAP isn’t a fancy tool, but it is hellish effective and can be used ethically.

Conclusions

Google Reader in itself isn’t evil. The features could quite reasonably for an ethical purpose.

I could quite easily grab all of Robert Scobles linkblog, automatically retag it all, and then feed it to a private blog for my own use, to better be able to find information on tech related subjects from a trusted source.

Something like that on a corporation intranet would be a valuable and possibly ethical use.

But in most such uses, the original author is not going to have subscribers to their feed, and is not going to know that their work is even being read.

My strongest advice is to avoid abusing this feature, and not publish the location of your linkfeed, especially on a high traffic blog.

To ensure I stay on topic, it should be noted that Google Reader is a very powerful tool for the creation of niche websites. I admit to using various tools to reuse and mix 3rd party content, including Blog Auto Publisher, but the content I use is with permission and where necessary with attribution.

Update: Some Supplementary Information

The sharing feature within Google Reader isn’t new. The big point is that until now, very few people have been sharing their feeds with others. It was introduced March 21st 2006 on the Google Reader blog.

Here is a very good technical overview of how feeds can be shared with Google Reader

Here is a nice list of tools that can be used to create splogs, but they can be used to create unique content as well, that has value to the readers of the content. We can add Google Reader to the list.