My content, my readers, my numbers, damnit
Hey, My Yahoo, Google Reader, Pluck, Newsgator Enterprise and other RSS readers: Hand over my numbers. You are taking my RSS feed and caching it to serve more efficiently, which would be fine if only you told me how many times you are doing that. But you’re not.
Brad Feld is much more polite than I am about this. He complains that My Yahoo just stopped reporting how many subscribers a feed gets there and Google Reader never did report and many others, including those I list above, don’t report subscribers, even though there is an easy and automated way to do that.
That’s theft. If you took a song and cached it and fed it out to lots of people these days without reporting back to the owner, you’d get sued or slapped in jail.
Well, all I ask that you do for caching my feed is to report back the number of subscribers. Not much to ask. And not doing that is tantamount to theft.
Why do I care? Because I have an ego. Because I want to see how much RSS I serve and learn about it. Because I want to see how efficient my advertising is. And just because. Damnit.
RSS is becoming a ever-more-important transport mechanism but without metrics, some will refuse to be transported by it. My Yahoo and Google Reader are making hay including RSS in their new products. They should practice good citizenship and share the data those feeds generate with their creators.
I can’t go to the Syndicate conference this time, because it’s in California, but if I were there, I’d wear a T-shirt and carry a picket sign to all the players listed here and in my Feedburner report:
FREE MY FEED SUBSCRIBERS. HAND OVER MY NUMBERS.
: LATER: I should add that I’m not against caching because it saves on my server load. But I do want to maintain a relationship with readers who subscribed to my blatherings and the barest way to do that is to get statistics. I also am not crazy about services changing feeds without my permission; some cut my full-text feed back to just headlines. Do newsstands refuse to tell you how many copies of your publication they sell? Do they cut out pages and give you only covers? No. Online distributors should operate by similar rules of the road.
: UPDATE: Jeremy Zawodny, of Yahoo, reports in the comments that the Yahoo counts will be back; it’s a bug to be fixed. Bravo. Now how about you, Google?
: LATER: See a followup post on a fundamental principle, above.
: LATER CONFIRMATION: I also just heard from a Yahoo exec who confirms that, indeed, something got broken in an upgrade and that they will feed back stats on feeds. Once again, thanks, Yahoo.
: LATER STILL: (Repeating this from the post above): Matt Cutts of Google says in the comments here that he will mention this to the guys at Google Reader and believes there’s no reason not to build it into a next version of that new product. Bravo again.
Tags: Internet, measurement, rss
November 26th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis: “That’s theft. If you took a song and cached it and fed it out to lots of people these days without reporting back to the owner, you’d get sued or slapped in jail.” [...]
November 26th, 2005 at 6:29 pm
Try iTunes …the podcasts are cached there too
November 26th, 2005 at 6:32 pm
I don’t know about your RSS feed, but most I’ve seen only give a headline or slightly more, so the reader needs to click through to see the story. If this is true for you then you would see the traffic at your site as well as a refer (sic) field telling you where they came from.
If your RSS extract is so insightful that nobody need to click through then you shouldn’t be putting so much up, or perhaps the headline is enough to get the gist.
You should also see the numbe of times your RSS page is fetched in your log as well.
November 26th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
The My Yahoo numbers will be back. A bug caused them to go out of wack, so they disabled it for a bit until the fix can go out.
November 26th, 2005 at 7:02 pm
I’m 99% sure NewsGator Enterprise is reporting subscribers via user agent. All the other NewsGator products do - I’ll double check on this one. Yes - I’m more polite, but just as annoyed .
November 26th, 2005 at 7:23 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis started a “non-topic” that a few other so-called A-Listers picked up on, already. He’s complaining that he can’t satisfy his ego because certain services are caching his RSS feed, and not providing him with subscriber numbers. Get over it, Jeff! You need to get over it, too, Scoble! Dave Winer commented on Jeff’s post, also, only mentioning what was posted, and not giving his opinion. In my opinion, there is a major difference between RSS feeds and music, which is the comparison that Jeff gives. There are other ways of finding out how many times any of your posts are “viewed” without depending on other service providers. If they haven’t figured out how to do that, then I can see why they’re complaining. [...]
November 26th, 2005 at 8:43 pm
LiveJournal’s syndication feature offers full-text of your RSS feed, so I only click over to read comments here on one in every ten to twelve posts.
LJ offers a userinfo page for every syndicated account — that is, every RSS feed a user has requested to be able to view from their LiveJournal Friends view. Yours indicates that you have ten readers there.
November 26th, 2005 at 8:50 pm
My Feed pops up all over the place next to other peoples ads!
I like to think of it as a Radio Transmitter amplifying my signal….
http://feeds.feedburner.com/PaulMooney
November 26th, 2005 at 8:59 pm
The popularly accepted spelling is “dammit”.
November 26th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
There are sites like this where feeds are just republished as web pages (with ads). There’s no way count readers when sites are doing this.
November 26th, 2005 at 9:19 pm
Listen, websites have had to deal with this problem for far longer than bloggers. Many, many ISPs (like AOL) heavily cache site content, and thus make it difficult to identify the real number of visitors to a site.
To see a similar thing happen to blogs only means that their particular type of content is now large enough for delivery effiiciency to trump fine-grained usage statistics.
So? Get over it.
November 26th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
Theft is a strong word, Jeff. They’re providing you a service, and because they are not providing you another service as well you accuse them of theft? Bloggers accuse Google of arrogance all the time, but it doesn’t help when bloggers display it themselves while criticising Google.
November 26th, 2005 at 9:52 pm
Darrell, and major websites, including ones I worked with, objected strongly and got around that by serving redirects and invisible gifs. But RSS doesn’t enable that as consistently.
November 26th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
Jeff, it’s not “theft”, because you didn’t provide a contract agreement for your XML version upfront — you just put a resource out into the universe, free for anyone to use. It’s not surprising it gets reused in ways you may not have imagined.
I think that what you’re asking for is reasonable, but it’s harder to demand such a contract after the fact.
November 26th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
[...] Tom Simpson regarding Jeff’s request: “If you write a book, the publisher knows how many copies of the book have sold, and they can report that to you. Do they report how many copies were sold to libraries (cache)? Do the libraries report how many times the book has been checked out?” [...]
November 26th, 2005 at 11:47 pm
[...] Remember how Jeff brought Dell to its knees (or atleast made a bunch of noise)? This afternoon Jeff started a new jihad - this time he is going after My Yahoo, Google Reader, Pluck, Newsgator Enterprise and other RSS readers. What does he want? He wants his stats. How many times are you delivering his feed? He wants to know. Seems reasonable enough. [...]
November 27th, 2005 at 12:01 am
Embed a tiny image hosted on your site and grep your log. That’ll be more accurate than anything else.
November 27th, 2005 at 12:46 am
[...] Finally aggregator caching practice is causing A-listers to throw some good tantrums ! Theft analogy by Jeff Jarvis is a pretty significant point. [...]
November 27th, 2005 at 1:04 am
I agree that having stats is a good thing. But there is no reason why your RSS feed should be sending more than a headline and a sentence. It is easy to set it up so this is exactly what it does and, from an aggregation perspective it is way easier.
I have a small aggregator in Canada at http://canada.info-syn.com One of the banes of my existence are people who post long and whose RSS feeds are full post.
(By the way…the big bucks are a tiny bit elusive in the aggregator world. If I see ten cents a day, admittely US, I crack open the bottled water.)
November 27th, 2005 at 2:24 am
Rojo used to have the same issue (reporting one pull down of the feed irregardless of the number of suscribers), and they came around to fixing it. I see my numbers dropping hundreds of readers sometimes, just because of an API call issue.
I guess that all these services will report their detailed numbers eventually.
November 27th, 2005 at 2:34 am
[...] All things considered, I have to assume that Google properties (personalized homepage, Reader) are a significant portion of my RSS subscribers, possibly one of the biggest. So why won’t Google help me publicize that fact? Jeff Jarvis is 100% correct, and there are other good reasons: If I were an RSS advertiser, wouldn’t I need those numbers? Google is hurting RSS as long as it keeps those stats to itself, as is any other feed-caching service that does the same. (via Findory) Posted: November 27, 2005 by Nathan Weinberg in: [...]
November 27th, 2005 at 2:42 am
[...] I’d hoped memorandum was better than this. Jeff Jarvis complains about My Yahoo and other RSS readers “stealing” his feed by caching it and not telling him how many hits the cached copy gets. It may sound like a lot of whining, but it gets better. [...]
November 27th, 2005 at 2:58 am
[...] Stats, stats, stats, that is what it is all about. Jarvis is more forthcoming than most. Why do I care? Because I have an ego. Because I want to see how much RSS I serve and learn about it. Because I want to see how efficient my advertising is. And just because. Damnit. [...]
November 27th, 2005 at 3:01 am
So, will you pay for the cache-ing? You wnat the benefits bit not the costs.
November 27th, 2005 at 9:05 am
[...] My content, my readers, my numbers, damnit [...]
November 27th, 2005 at 9:58 am
The web is (aggressively) cached. Deal.
November 27th, 2005 at 10:46 am
[...] If you just see it as an egoistical usage, please go on and blog about it or give a comment. It helps me to get to know you, because in the world I am living in, those numbers matter. Not to pimp my ego, not to go around and talk about them, but as information for myself if you appreciate the work I am doing here or if there is room for improvement. [...]
November 27th, 2005 at 11:54 am
These services are doing Jeff a favor? Does Jeff pay for caching? Please. It’s a two-way deal: RSS publishers get broader readership and lower bandwidth bills and the services get a business model (they hope). Jeff (and all other RSS publishers) make these businesses possible and it’s neither unreasonable nor arrogant to ask for some basic statistics in return.
November 27th, 2005 at 12:12 pm
I don’t think you really need much of an ego to care about your content, which is your intellectual property.
November 27th, 2005 at 3:49 pm
[...] This is a follow up to a previous post on RSS caching. I got up today and read your additions and more of the comments on your post, and I see where you’re coming from now. I agree that it’d be nice to see where my content is going. In particular, Seth comments: These services are doing Jeff a favor? Does Jeff pay for caching? Please. It’s a two-way deal: RSS publishers get broader readership and lower bandwidth bills and the services get a business model (they hope). Jeff (and all other RSS publishers) make these businesses possible and it’s neither unreasonable nor arrogant to ask for some basic statistics in return. [...]
November 27th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
Reporting Subscriber Numbers in HTTP Headers
Jeff Jarvis is angsty, and he wants to know how many people subscribe to his feeds via some of the hosted aggregation services [FeedLounge, Bloglines, Google Reader, etc.]. In his rant, he points to an entry about sending forward the number of subscr…
November 27th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
Jeff,
I’m a blogger, too, and I agree that the lack of decent numbers is — at least — an annoyance. But with that said, I find your sense of entitlement to be even more annoying… not to mention your obnoxiously hyperbolic use of “theft” to describe the issue. What next…? Should folks scream at the NYT when they don’t get to know how many folks read a letter to the editor they got posted there?
As I commented on Threadwatch, I think many of us bloggers need to put things in perspective and, quite frankly, get a life.
November 28th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Jeff, that’s a good suggestion. Google Reader is a pretty recent product, so I’m sure that the team has a lot of things that they’re working on, but I’ll mention this as a request. I’m guessing that no one is opposed to this at Google, but that they just have to prioritize and that they’ll get to this at some point down the road.
November 28th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
NewsGator Enterprise Server definitely reports subscriber statistics - here’s an example from my blog’s server log:
NewsGatorEnterprise/1.0a+(http://www.newsgator.com;+51+subscribers)
However…this can be turned off by the enterprise administrator. Some companies do not want to release subscriber information to external sources (investment banks are an example), so they have the option to turn it off.
November 28th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
Whoa… did someone throw a switch somewhere? My Feedburner RSS numbers increased by 20% yesterday after holding steady for a long time. Not complaining, but still….
November 29th, 2005 at 6:39 pm
For someone who preaches to stop thinking like old media, comparing your RSS feed to selling magazines and theft of photographs is off-the-mark.
But I do want to maintain a relationship with readers who subscribed to my blatherings and the barest way to do that is to get statistics.
The barest way to do that, Jeff, is to write well. You have readers because of what you say, not because of the number of folks who read your pieces.
I am surprised by your outrage over this. Eventually, all that is new is old again . . .
November 29th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis went on a little rant today, about how he expected Google and Yahoo RSS readers to report back to him his number of subscribers. He also called out Newsgator Enterprise for it (which I don’t get, cause my free service from them reports subscription numbers). [...]
December 5th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
FeedLounge has reported subscriber numbers in the User Agent from near day one.
The question I have is the aggregation of these numbers. Does FeedBurner read FeedLounge’s User Agent to know that FeedLounge is more than one subscriber? This is where it gets interesting…
December 19th, 2005 at 6:04 pm
[...] Oh, I agree with this: Hand over my numbers, cries Jeff Jarvis. Turns out most of the online aggregators are caching RSS feeds and aren’t reporting how many people are subscribing. [...]
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December 5th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Looks like you got a little bit of Spam going on.