For RSS to Thrive, Make It More Prominent

RSS used to be ubiquitous. Every blog had an RSS button somewhere. So did many news sites in the days before social media. RSS is making a comeback at the moment, but it’s nowhere as omnipresent on websites as it used to be.

What happened? Safari supported RSS in the past. Apple added some basic support to the browser in 2004 but removed the feature in 2012. Some connect RSS’ decline to the popular Google Reader, which was axed in 2013. I’ve never used Reader, and there have always been alternatives. I don’t think that the lack of feed-reader software led to the demise of RSS adoption.

What happened was monetisation. To make money on the Web today, you either charge users for your product or sell ads. Many news and social media sites offer content of varying quality, and they are rarely essential to people’s lives, so users usually won’t pay for their usage. So you sell ads. And to sell ads, you need page views. To get page views, you want visitors to linger on your site to open as many pages as possible.

RSS encourages usage patterns that oppose continued engagement. It notifies readers when a new story is posted; there is no incentive to constantly re-visit sites to check for updates. Likewise, the barebones nature of how feeds are presented doesn’t trick you into clicking elsewhere. You read what you’re interested in and move on to the next.

As a result, big sites removed or stopped advertising feeds on their pages:

Twitter used to offer RSS feeds. Some argue they removed them because Google Reader didn’t display title-less feeds correctly. Yeah right. They removed it, so people sign up for Twitter because that would be the only way to follow someone.
Medium offers RSS feeds but hides them. At least they’ve got instructions on how the subscribe in their docs.
The New York Times offers a wide variety of feeds, but you have to Google to find them.
So does The Guardian.
The German weekly paper Die Zeit has an RSS feed but doesn’t advertise it, even though they ran a piece about RSS in 2020.
Most indie blogs offer RSS, but there are still a surprising number of sites that don’t display a link to their feed. I have to view-source and sift through the page header to find the link.

What can we do to make RSS a format that isn’t just appreciated by a few nerds? Advertise RSS. The RSS icon that used to be universal, you could find it on many, many websites. We need to put RSS on every website that offers feeds. Unfamiliar users will get curious. And they might try using a feed reader, which will stick because it is convenient. They will demand better integration into browsers and ask big news websites to offer their feeds more prominently.