With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative
Email no longer works, and RSS/ Blogging is one potential alternative. But hang on ... email no longer works; this is a strong statement. Clearly there is direction towards fixing email problems with spam and filters, but companies are starting to get realise that and stop contributing to SPAM. This will take a while, and the damage may be done, even if they are successful in stopping spam. Its unlikely they will ever stop that pervert in South America, or those stupid guys in Nigeria with their fake business English, who we have all seen selling, respectively, sex or money.
Email does suffer from one fundamental problem .... its like a phone call .... it comes to you whether you want it or not. And from the senders perspective its worse than a phone call, because there is no way to tell if it was received, and certainly no way to tell if it was desired. Lockergnome, the largest email newsletter in the world, is telling customers to unsubscribe, and start using RSS (he is awesome by the way).
So whats so special about RSS. First of all, it is truly opt-in. If you point your "newsreader" to an RSS feed, its your choice. But this creates a new problem I have already. My reader is full ... its too time consuming to sort it out. I have one which has a newspaper format, but its still not personalised enough, so some work to do there.
So while the answer isn't totally clear, we can see light on the horizon.
With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative
STOP THE PRESSES!
By Steve Outing
"Publishers Must Find New Delivery Methods"
Who'd have thought that things could get this bad? E-mail -- long touted as the 'killer app' of the Internet and the best online channel for publishers -- is rapidly being decimated by spammers and virus writers. Yes, 'decimated' is an accurate word. The evidence is quickly mounting that e-mail is no longer an efficient means for ethical publishers to reach subscribers.
Indeed, some e-mail publishers are starting to think the unthinkable -- giving up on e-mail and moving to other means of reaching subscribers. Yeah, that sounds pretty radical. But with e-mail under siege and no relief in sight, radical measures are required.
It's time to move on to something that's (we hope) spam-proof. You've probably heard about RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, and is sometimes called Really Simple Syndication. With e-mail on a rapid decline, RSS is the heir apparent. Now all publishers need to do is figure out how to make a business of RSS content distribution.
Is It Really That Bad?
I first wrote about the problems of ethical e-mail publishers more than a year ago, in an E&P Online column: 'I'm Sick and Tired Of Spam (Filters): They're Blocking Legitimate E-mail From Publishers.' (Available to E&P subscribers only.) Since then, things have gone from bad to worse.
Recent studies show that opt-in messages (that is, e-mail that people have asked to receive) are now erroneously blocked as spam by ISPs and e-mail services at rates of 17% (according to a Return Path study) to 38% (Mail.com study). Let me repeat: 17% to 38% of the e-mail you send out to customers who ask for it -- or even pay for it -- does not reach them. Sometimes it gets shuttled into a "junk" folder where it probably won't be seen by the subscriber; sometimes it's just unceremoniously deleted without the subscriber's knowledge, or the publisher's (since the filters often don't send bounce messages that would let you know what's happening).
Of the subscribers (62% to 83%) who do successfully receive e-mail from ethical publishers, there's another big chunk who don't open it. The typical opt-in commercial/marketing message is opened only about 40% of the time, according to the most recent Doubleclick E-mail Trend Report. E-mail newsletters typically fare better, but nevertheless a lot of them sit unopened. As users' in-boxes fill up with more and more junk, it's common for people to simply miss asked-for mail and inadvertently delete it -- or because of information overload, simply not have time to read it.
In the last couple of weeks, e-mail has also been impacted by the worst e-mail virus yet -- Sobig. Influential San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News technology columnist and blogger Dan Gillmor earlier this week wondered out loud in his Weblog whether the virus crisis, added to spam volume that exceeds legitimate e-mail, spells "the end of e-mail?"
Gillmor is not being paranoid. Information design consultant Michael Fraase in a column last week wrote, "The spammers won. E-mail, for anything other than communicating with individuals you know already, is useless. ... Online publishers are struggling with the loss of the spam war, because e-mail was one of the best publishing tools the non-corporate media has ever seen."
An E-mail Champion Recants
Even Chris Pirillo, the author who wrote "the book" on e-mail publishing in 1999, Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing, has all but given up on it as a publishing tool. Pirillo, also the proprietor of some of the largest e-mail newsletters on the Internet, Lockergnome's technology publications, is now discouraging people from signing up for his e-mail deliveries, instead pointing them to RSS as an alternative. He's even going further than that -- actively encouraging e-mail subscribers to drop their accounts and teaching them how to get the same content via RSS.
Why such an extreme approach? Pirillo is passionate about the failures of e-mail and the benefits of RSS. A primary motivator is the massive support costs endured by his Lockergnome enterprise -- which has several hundred thousand e-mail subscribers. That means fighting with "blacklist" operators who wrongfully block his opt-in newsletters as spam; working with ISPs and mail-server administrators to get them to "whitelist" (allow through) Lockergnome's mailings; doing individual customer support with subscribers who find they are no longer getting their newsletters; etc.
As of now, if an e-mail subscriber has a problem receiving Lockergnome newsletters, "They're on their own," Pirillo says. "We can't fight these battles any more."
When a subscriber writes in with a problem these days, what they'll hear back from Pirillo and company is advice on using RSS to get the same content. That means, most often, educating the e-mail user about how to find an RSS "aggregator" and sign up for a Lockergnome RSS "feed."
The Next Wave
Pirillo says the way around the e-mail mess is for ethical online publishers to go around them. "E-mail is a polluted medium," he says.
Evidence of the "pollution" is easy to find, of course -- not just in all the junk that's in everyone's in-boxes, but also in what opt-in e-mail publishers are having to do to circumvent the problems. A good example is the practice by an increasing number of e-mail publishers of disguising some words that spam filters might catch and block. I regularly receive newsletters from PaidContent.org and ContentBiz.com, for example, that purposefully misspell words to avoid spam filters. (For example, "b*east"; "s-pam"; etc.) When you have to go through such ridiculous gyrations in order to reach your customers, it's time to find a new way.
How does it work? Simply, RSS allows potential readers of a Web site to view part of its content -- typically headlines and short blurbs -- without having to visit the content directly (unless they want to click through to it). Viewing is done with a piece of software separate from the Web browser, the RSS aggregator, which the consumer uses to subscribe to "feeds" produced by favorite Internet publishers. The feeds are constantly updated as the publishers add new content.
The big advantage of RSS to a Web publisher is that it can significantly increase a site's visibility and reach. In the context of a news site, EEVL's "RSS Primer for Publishers & Content Providers" explains that "because there are so many sources of news on the Internet, most of your viewers won't come to your site every day. By providing an RSS feed, you are in front of them constantly, improving the chances that they'll click through to an article that catches their eye."
And by using RSS, a publisher enables others on the Internet to syndicate its headlines, so they show up on other Web sites as those publishers incorporate third-party headlines into their own sites -- viewer traffic that gets funneled back to the Web site of the original publisher.
RSS is still in the "infant" stage, even though it's been around for a decade, and even though a modest number of major publishers have discovered it (including The Christian Science Monitor of Boston, The Telegraph of Nashua, N.H., and BBC News.) The biggest problem -- which will certainly be solved soon -- is that Web browsers and e-mail clients do not currently accommodate RSS content. Some RSS readers are stand-alone applications (I've been using FeedDemon, currently in beta, and highly recommend it); some are add-ons that work inside a browser, and some work in concert with the Microsoft Outlook e-mail client. Others are Web-based aggregators that allow you to read RSS feeds as though you were viewing a Web site.
The big advantage of RSS is that it avoids the whole spam issue. RSS users don't divulge their e-mail addresses (no spam), and thus there's no spam filter involved that might block a publisher's content.
Pirillo points out that with e-mail, it's a channel that any and everyone is using -- ergo, all that spam from anyone who can figure out your e-mail address. With RSS, the consumer is getting only what he asks to see; it's a closed channel. No spam gets in the way of your subscriber getting what he wants. "It's 'me Internet,'" Pirillo says.
For many consumers, moving from e-mail newsletters to RSS feeds might seem daunting. It is up to publishers, then, to sell the RSS concept, and explain that it's a solution to the spam muddle.
RSS really is a better way, especially for those who regularly read a whole passel of Web sites, blogs, and/or e-newsletters. It replaces manually viewing a bunch of bookmarked sites with a single aggregation pane of fresh content, quickly consuming headlines and blurbs, and clicking through to the stuff that looks really interesting. It's a big time saver. (I have a long list of sites and blogs that I monitor daily. Before switching to RSS reading, I visited them each individually. Now, instead I read most of them -- not all offer RSS feeds yet -- using the FeedDemon aggregator. I estimate that it takes me one-quarter the time or less than the old way of surfing Web sites and reading e-mail newsletters.)
The immaturity of RSS does present problems. There are lots of readers out there, but they typically have shortcomings, such as assigning everything equal weight -- so it's not possible to have the RSS-news consumer see a "front-page" type of presentation that's similar to the experience of reading a newspaper page or news-site home page. But even at today's stage of RSS development, it's a good reading experience for the consumer. Expect to see RSS software improve over the next year or two, and for RSS to become a more robust publishing platform.
The RSS Business Model
Many e-mail publishers today remain afraid of RSS, suggests Pirillo, but there's little to fear. He points out that the business model of e-mail publishing doesn't really change using RSS. Readers still see the same ads, and the same content and design/layout that they would in receiving an HTML newsletter -- assuming that they find your site's headlines and blurbs worthy of clicking on to see full content.
Some publishers are even embedding text advertising within the headline/blurb sets that RSS users see initially in the RSS aggregator software (prior to clicking to see the full content).
And just as there are paid e-mail newsletters, so too can there be paid RSS news feeds. The only caveat there is that paying subscribers to an RSS news feed must use an RSS aggregator that supports authentication (that is, a log-in name and password to gain access to the content).
Pirillo emphasizes that a big advantage of having RSS subscribers is that they are less costly to maintain. Unsubscribing from an RSS feed is simple. Unsubscribing from an e-mail newsletter in theory is simple, but often is not because a subscriber may have changed e-mail addresses and not remember -- thus having to call for support in order to unsubscribe. From a business perspective, it's far cheaper to have 100,000 RSS subscribers than the same number of e-mail ones.
What Should You Do?
Any e-mail publisher with a survival instinct should be publishing RSS feeds of the content that it currently e-mails. "It's only a matter of time before e-mail newsletters go the way of the dinosaur," warns Pirillo.
Not everyone agrees. Randy Cassingham, a Ridgway, Colo.-based humorist who publishes a 118,000-circulation e-mail newsletter called This Is True, says he's sticking primarily with e-mail, but he's started offering an RSS feed as an alternative. He does not publish his content on the Web -- he also sells book compilations of his columns, so that could undermine sales -- and so he views RSS as a supplement to his e-mail list.
"I think e-mail is too useful to declare it dead," Cassingham says. He is holding out for better technical answers to the spam problem, combined with some federal legislation to curb abusers. "I think we'll see e-mail going back to being a useful medium again, instead of a pain."
Pirillo sees that reasoning as inadequate. "People are making excuses [for not converting to RSS]. They're afraid."
Whatever you believe, at least recognize that as a publishing platform, e-mail is now seriously impaired. Whether you convert to RSS whole-hog or just offer it as an alternative, now's a good time to start thinking about a transition in your business plan.
August 30, 2003 at 08:21 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink
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