Twitter is Killing RSS

By Jeff Nolan, VP Consumer and Media at NewsGator Technologies in Denver.  He is the author of the Venture Chronicles blog, focusing on technology, innovation, management and public policy, from which this article is excerpted.  He can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffnolan

Twitter is killing RSS as a marketing method.

There are two primary use cases for RSS:

1. Promotion of new content. This is a means for promoting new content through RSS client applications, widgets, iPhone apps, purpose specific apps, and so on. You see the headline and click on the content that interests you.
2. Content syndication. This is the true plumbing that offers low cost, reliability and convenience.

Few media sites enable full text RSS feeds and for a good reason: it robs them of site traffic that is monetized -- whereas RSS feeds are not. This has always hamstrung the utility of RSS outside of blogs, yet still provided “good enough” utility that you could still use it.

Truth be told, website publishers see RSS only as something they should do.  At the same time, website publishers do not really embrace it because it strips branding elements out, is notoriously difficult to monetize, and has stagnated as a technology because in the absence of branding and monetization there really isn’t much of a movement behind RSS to evolve the standard(s). It provides utility for end users but not much benefit for publishers and content owners.

Something interesting happened around Decemver 2008, as Twitter achieved critical mass and bloggers and mainstream media alike adopted it to promote content. Every post I write on my blog is automatically tweeted out with the post title and link to source, not unlike what other sites do.  Over the last year I have noticed a steady increase in referral traffic from Twitter as my followers grew to 1,389 and links to my posts were clicked on.  In essence people are following me much as they subscribe to my RSS feed. I like it because the traffic returns to my site rather than be consumed in a RSS client that I can’t apply integrated analytics to, and have to guess what my traffic actually is.

In my own usage behaviors I noticed something starting when I followed ZDNetBlogs quite a while back, I stopped reading their RSS feed and started getting my story links through their Twitter updates. Today I use the much improved Twitter search function to find profiles for the publications I like to read, following them and getting their content via links in tweets. For bloggers, the ability to follow a Tweeter provides not only the content updates in most cases but also the opportunity to interact with the authors and catch all their other updates that wouldn’t even show up in RSS.

Twitter provides publishers with several key advantages over RSS, namely the ability to control brand and force traffic back to their monetized site. Of course none of this precludes them from also using RSS to distribute content and there are equally compelling reasons for doing.  But if I were to make a prediction it would be that publishers increasingly find primary utility for RSS in the backoffice while de-empathizing RSS for audience acquisition, in the process embracing Twitter as a mechanism for engaging an audience and promoting content at the same time.