DISQUS

Tom Fakes · 2 years ago

I'm using NewsGator online, and their feed isn't updating at all. Until I went looking, I didn't know they'd moved. At that point, I realized that I didn't really care about reading them everyday.

Andrew · 2 years ago

Ugh.. what a stupid idea. It is one of my fav. blogs, and I probably won't read any of it now.

Ed Lee · 2 years ago

doesn't the globe and mail offer partial feeds though?
Ed

spullara · 2 years ago

Why would they care whether you read their blog or not if you aren't going back to their site? You are not entitled to their content for nothing.

Mathew · 2 years ago

Yes, we do Ed -- and I don't like it when we do it either :-)

Tom Fakes · 2 years ago

Sam: In the brave new world of media, you should actually be giving some things away to keep people interested so you have a better chance of selling them something that you may not have done otherwise.

I see their blog as a way for them to keep readers interested between books, and the money to be made when they sell more books because people are hooked on their blog.

Now that I don't read their blog, I am less likely to buy their books, so they should care that they lost me.

Right now, they are getting paid for their blog as well, and it's so painful to read that they are losing readers, and losing the attention of their book buying public.

The wholistic approach is important, cover as many bases as possible to mazimize revenue over all outlets.

spullara · 2 years ago

Advertising is far more lucrative than selling books. So they can either count on some future return where their blog readers eventually buy books or they can advertise today and make money and sell books later. My guess is that they are increasing their holistic revenue by serving partials. Its not like there is no utility to being told when a new entry is available and what it is about. This being said, they could just advertise within their feed but my guess is that you would throw up on that as well.

May C · 2 years ago

I agree and also dislike partial feeds. It's annoying to have to make that extra click to view something so I instead just have Bloglines show the titles instead since it's a waste of time for me to have partial feeds. I don't understand, okay, I do know why they're there but certainly dislike them.

thadk · 2 years ago

More support for your theory of "making content pay": You cannot view any of the *.blogs.nytimes.com within an iframe--it breaks out. I note that this makes using Google Reader Preview (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9455) with Google Reader impossible. When you open a Freakonomics entry it tears down your whole Google Reader.

Tom · 2 years ago

Anyone who hates partial feeds might be interested in the tool I wrote to solve this particular problem:

http://labs.echoditto.com/fulltextrss

Works well for the Freakonomics feed.