My viewpoint is a bit different on this. First off, Feedly has no way of showing the user the entire article, even if they first direct them to the feedly app. Feedly should show the preview with a snippet, then provide a "View Website" link.
That is, unless you output the entire blog post on your RSS feed. If you do this, then that's your own fault.
Therefore we are left with the question. Does this harm your site and/or metrics? Short answer. No.
Are your users going to your articles from Feedly short links? Probably not. Why would you link your users to a feedly short link to begin with?
In the end, what Feedly is doing is doing a disservice to their end user. It makes the process confusing by creating more hoops to get to the original content. Those short links frankly do not need to exist.
We all know what Feedly is trying to do, and in the end they should stick to building premium features rather than something like this.
unless you output the entire blog post on your RSS feed. If you do this, then that's your own fault.
I understand the reasons against posting your entire blog on an RSS feed, but it hurts usability so much. If I'm opening my feed reader I would like to stay there and not have to continuously open a post in my browser and then jump back again. If a RSS feed does not contain the full posts I need to be extremely interested in the content to still follow it.
I have seen special ads embedded into feeds. Sure, they are not dynamic, targeted and what not, but they are hand selected, probably relevant, and under total control of the content provider.
One alternative, for a site that earns money based on page views, would be to charge a very small subscription fee for its RSS feed. I would certainly pay that for some of the feeds I subscribe to.
I can imagine some of the technical difficulties can be challenging to overcome. Especially how do you identify your user? Often you don't see which user is fetching a feed, but only the service through which they are fetching it. For example I'm using Gwene to access my feeds in the same format I access my news groups.
But honestly is something I would pay for: provide me access to your raw content (with images, tags, categories and some mark-up) so I can just present it to myself in whichever fashion I want. I'm allergic to most web design and prefer things to be plain text, now I could do that without having to reverse engineer APIs or strange deals so the content-provider still gets page clicks. You also get a whole new eco system for third party applications.
If users get all your content without visiting your site (where all your monetization is: ads, upsell, etc), then you're giving your content away for free and losing money. However, if you only give a sentence in the RSS feed (ala CNET and others), it's really not a useful feed. I like that many sites have found a happy medium of including a few full paragraphs so you can get an idea if you'd like to continue reading the story.
And, no, ads embedded in the RSS feed itself won't work. You can't do that with any ad network ads at all, you can only do that with manual referral links and the like. It's more time-consuming (it involves manual work for every single ad) and makes far less money.
Comments
My viewpoint is a bit different on this. First off, Feedly has no way of showing the user the entire article, even if they first direct them to the feedly app. Feedly should show the preview with a snippet, then provide a "View Website" link.
That is, unless you output the entire blog post on your RSS feed. If you do this, then that's your own fault.
Therefore we are left with the question. Does this harm your site and/or metrics? Short answer. No.
Are your users going to your articles from Feedly short links? Probably not. Why would you link your users to a feedly short link to begin with?
In the end, what Feedly is doing is doing a disservice to their end user. It makes the process confusing by creating more hoops to get to the original content. Those short links frankly do not need to exist.
We all know what Feedly is trying to do, and in the end they should stick to building premium features rather than something like this.
I understand the reasons against posting your entire blog on an RSS feed, but it hurts usability so much. If I'm opening my feed reader I would like to stay there and not have to continuously open a post in my browser and then jump back again. If a RSS feed does not contain the full posts I need to be extremely interested in the content to still follow it.
As a user, sure. As a publisher, full article feeds are incompatible with web ads.
I have seen special ads embedded into feeds. Sure, they are not dynamic, targeted and what not, but they are hand selected, probably relevant, and under total control of the content provider.
One alternative, for a site that earns money based on page views, would be to charge a very small subscription fee for its RSS feed. I would certainly pay that for some of the feeds I subscribe to.
I can imagine some of the technical difficulties can be challenging to overcome. Especially how do you identify your user? Often you don't see which user is fetching a feed, but only the service through which they are fetching it. For example I'm using Gwene to access my feeds in the same format I access my news groups.
But honestly is something I would pay for: provide me access to your raw content (with images, tags, categories and some mark-up) so I can just present it to myself in whichever fashion I want. I'm allergic to most web design and prefer things to be plain text, now I could do that without having to reverse engineer APIs or strange deals so the content-provider still gets page clicks. You also get a whole new eco system for third party applications.
If users get all your content without visiting your site (where all your monetization is: ads, upsell, etc), then you're giving your content away for free and losing money. However, if you only give a sentence in the RSS feed (ala CNET and others), it's really not a useful feed. I like that many sites have found a happy medium of including a few full paragraphs so you can get an idea if you'd like to continue reading the story.
And, no, ads embedded in the RSS feed itself won't work. You can't do that with any ad network ads at all, you can only do that with manual referral links and the like. It's more time-consuming (it involves manual work for every single ad) and makes far less money.