It has recently come to our attention that roughly 90% of the people who read this blog via RSS feed had their subscriptions interrupted when we moved our blog to NYTimes.com about 10 days ago. (If you don’t read this blog via feed, you probably have no idea what I am talking about, and nothing in this post will matter to you.) There are four things to say about this:
1. The problem is now fixed.
2. Sorry.
3. Welcome back.
4. The feed currently being sent out by the Times is not the full feed; instead you will be receiving an excerpt of each post, requiring you to click through to the Times site to read the whole blog.
There are a few more things to say about No. 4:
1. If things are now working properly, your reader has just been stuffed full of about 10 days’ worth of blogging that ran the gamut from terrorism to the science of insulting women to Presidential power.
2. If you are anything like the 10% of our feed readers whose subscriptions did get properly redirected last week, you will probably be unhappy about losing the full feed.
3. The partial feed that the Times been offering since the move was apparently pretty terrible — too short and not very informative — but has apparently just been made somewhat less terrible, though how much less I don’t yet know.
4. By Monday, we hope to have final word on the Times‘s position on whether to restore a full feed, and I’ll write a more thorough update then. In the meantime, feel free to express yourself in the comments section below, but know that it will be hard to come up with a new way of saying “This feed sucks,” which has been the gist of approximately 80% of the e-mails we’ve gotten in the past week.
5. Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend.
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Thanks! I missed ya, glad you fixed it and PLEASE bring back full feeds. I use feed reader so I don’t have to click through, so a partial feed defeats the purpose.
Thanks! I missed ya, glad you fixed it and PLEASE bring back full feeds. I use feed reader so I don’t have to click through, so a partial feed defeats the purpose.
In the end I doubt we’ll get a full feed, and it won’t be because of freakanomics, just regular economics. I assume you’re being paid for this gig. If your readers don’t click through to the NYT, the NYT won’t make any money. The only other solution — putting ads in the middle of the full feed — doesn’t seem like it has market traction yet, so I doubt that option will be amenable to the bean counters at the NYT.
I’m not really sure why everyone is so bewildered, though. That basic economics plays itself out on the web would seem to make perfect sense, no? It’ll be a little more work for an editor to tease the good stuff into a paragraph so you can decide if it’s worth clicking-through, but after that, you’ll be doing your part to ensure the micro-payment economy keeps the NYT afloat. There’s no free lunch, not sure why this should be any different?
Now if they are writing this for free, however, because it sells books, then this is a pure vanity play and I’d suggest the NYT full-feed it imediately. I assume that’s not the case, though.
In the end I doubt we’ll get a full feed, and it won’t be because of freakanomics, just regular economics. I assume you’re being paid for this gig. If your readers don’t click through to the NYT, the NYT won’t make any money. The only other solution — putting ads in the middle of the full feed — doesn’t seem like it has market traction yet, so I doubt that option will be amenable to the bean counters at the NYT.
I’m not really sure why everyone is so bewildered, though. That basic economics plays itself out on the web would seem to make perfect sense, no? It’ll be a little more work for an editor to tease the good stuff into a paragraph so you can decide if it’s worth clicking-through, but after that, you’ll be doing your part to ensure the micro-payment economy keeps the NYT afloat. There’s no free lunch, not sure why this should be any different?
Now if they are writing this for free, however, because it sells books, then this is a pure vanity play and I’d suggest the NYT full-feed it imediately. I assume that’s not the case, though.
If you want me to help you guys figure out what to do, I’m willing. I brought the NY Times into the world of RSS in 2002, and managed the feeds for the first couple of years.
First question I have is why did you guys move this site inside the Times system? What were you hoping to gain from it? Is it all about ad revenue? Perhaps you could sell something else through this site, something else that would generate as much or more revenue?
It seems like the Freakonomics site is the perfect place to experiment, given the topic. I’m a big fan of the book, and the way of thinking about things. This is certainly one of those cases, like the day care center pricing example in the book, where the “obvious” answer is probably not the most profitable one.
If you want me to help you guys figure out what to do, I’m willing. I brought the NY Times into the world of RSS in 2002, and managed the feeds for the first couple of years.
First question I have is why did you guys move this site inside the Times system? What were you hoping to gain from it? Is it all about ad revenue? Perhaps you could sell something else through this site, something else that would generate as much or more revenue?
It seems like the Freakonomics site is the perfect place to experiment, given the topic. I’m a big fan of the book, and the way of thinking about things. This is certainly one of those cases, like the day care center pricing example in the book, where the “obvious” answer is probably not the most profitable one.
I agree with the requests for a full feed. While some blogs lend themselves well to excerpts or even just headlines, this one does not. Why? Because you guys have extremely dense posts (I mean this as a positive) that are, I think, hard to summarize in a manner that gives me enough information for me to determine that I want to read through the whole post. I used to skim each full length post in Google Reader and if I found it of interest, I’d read the whole thing in depth. I can’t do that with an excerpt, and thus far the excerpts don’t really grab me. I used to read about 1 of 3 of the posts in full, but with the click through, I think I’ve read 3 (including this one) since you went to the NYT.
I agree with the requests for a full feed. While some blogs lend themselves well to excerpts or even just headlines, this one does not. Why? Because you guys have extremely dense posts (I mean this as a positive) that are, I think, hard to summarize in a manner that gives me enough information for me to determine that I want to read through the whole post. I used to skim each full length post in Google Reader and if I found it of interest, I’d read the whole thing in depth. I can’t do that with an excerpt, and thus far the excerpts don’t really grab me. I used to read about 1 of 3 of the posts in full, but with the click through, I think I’ve read 3 (including this one) since you went to the NYT.