Has RSS bitten the dust?
What does RSS stand for? As per the official site, it is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. However, a generally accepted convention is that this expansion, along with ‘Rich Site Summary’ are only backronyms (a portmanteau of back and acronym). Rather, the original acronym was intended to be RDF Site Summary (we get it! an acronym within an acronym).
Okay, enough with the trivia overload. RSS essentially refers to files read by a computer called XML files. So, the user has a feed reader that converts the files from website to an easy-to-read format. This content is distributed real-time so that the user’s feed has the latest content published by a site. How is this content sourced? The author of the website you have subscribed to also creates a feed which maintains a list of updates or notifications.
It is the aggregator that is primarily responsible for the convenience of RSS feeds. This aggregator checks each site for new content and pulls that content to your feed so that you don’t have to manually visit each site. The aggregator also keeps a track of articles or content you have read.
Yet, RSS appears to be fairly dying, which is clear from the Google Search trends.
Now, to truly understand why RSS has failed, one must trudge to the basics, and distinguish the protocol from the reader, the software that interprets the protocol. Some of the RSS readers that use the protocol are Flipboard and Feedly. In fact, even Google’s decision to shut down Google Reader (to increase Google+ usage and compete with Facebook, which failed regardless) also accelerated the decline of RSS. Now, only a few of the challenges with RSS are reader-centric and can be fixed with better product sign, most of the pain points however are problems with the protocol itself.
Firstly, the current protocol of RSS only organizes all the stories in the particular area of interest in chronological order. Most users lack the time to digest all these content. Instead they would prefer prioritization of important content first. The other issue is with duplicate stories. This is because stories are tagged with more than one keyboard. Thus users end up seeing the same story twice and still miss out on important stories they might want to see. The other major challenge is discovery and curation. In fact curation is a challenge still faced by Twitter and Reddit, and curation is also the reason for Facebook’s success.
But if one had to narrow done to the major reason for failure, it would be the issue with analytics. RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. It’s nearly impossible to get an idea of how many RSS subscribers there are. It is also impossible to measure the time spent on an article, or even if someone opened an article. Granted, lack of analytics is a privacy boon but internet revolves around advertising. Analytics significantly increases revenue from advertising, and that makes it all the more important for such companies to have trackers.
RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. Brand Equity in media is extremely important and losing logos, colours and fonts in an article can kill enterprise value.
The way forward
So how do we get escape from the hegemony of Facebook? The solution should be a set of improvements. RSS protocol should be expanded to offer more data around prioritization and make the technology more effective at the reader layer. In addition to updating the protocol, one must also update the content management systems that publish an RSS feed.
This leads to the next challenge, and the most significant of them — solving the business model of RSS. There should be an e-commerce layer around feeds, so that there is an incentive to improve and optimize the RSS experience. This should be similar to the Amazon Prime subscription model, where users can pay a reasonable price to get feeds from his favourite news sources. This would also solve the problem of privacy.
RSS readers should also get smarter with respect to marketing and on-boarding. They need to suggest relevant content to users and curate their feeds with algorithms, which should be an optional feature. Local Machine Learning models can be used to maximize privacy. In the backdrop of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, RSS could still make a comeback.
Conclusion
Will RSS become ubiquitous again? Probably not and definitely not in the decentralized manner discussed. Moreover users don’t really seem to be concerned about privacy (Facebook’s growth has not been hindered despite their stealing data.) But with the right business model in place, there could be enough users to make such a renewed approach to streams viable for companies and that is the most critical ingredient needed for a fresh news economy and RSS to come back to life.
Sources:
https://rss.com/blog/how-do-rss-feeds-work/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/what-is-an-rss-feed/
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss
