The truth is that eventually, the ones deciding of the RSS fate are not going to be subscribers, but publishers. Publishers, big (media outlets, blogging platforms) or small (indie bloggers or CMS users) can easily decide whether they want RSS to die or to thrive.
Break RSS
If you’re one of these influential tech blog who makes their butter with bold statements and who claimed that RSS is dead, that RSS is a technology of the past, or something that never did anything useful to you, why don’t you just put your money where your mouth is: remove your RSS feeds, delete your feedburner account.
Of course, don’t do that blindly. Do that on the course of a couple months and make sure you monitor everything. Will your frequentation drop? Will people share your content less? Will your SEO start to degrade as well? I’d say yes, yes and yes, but please, prove me wrong.
At this point, Buzzfeed showed Google Reader alone brings more traffic that Google+, Google Reader alone still has a massive userbase, and Matt Cutts told us that PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds are used to identify unique content.
Make RSS
On the other hand, if you think that distributing your content on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ (ha!) is necessary but not enough, if you think that having a truly open and decentralized way of letting other services (and eventually their users) know about the new content you publish is the way to go, then, help us make RSS feeds better and easier to use for everyone.
Making feeds better starts by putting yourself in the shoes of your readers. Let’s say I just stumbled upon an article on your site that I liked; and let’s say that I want more. How, as a site owner do you make it convenient for me to do so? What do you think should be the steps for me to get there? Are these steps easy and simple enough?
We strongly believe that it starts with a button. A simple button that says , and which, when pressed will show your readers a list of options. We have designed such a button and called it SubToMe. If you think it makes things better, you should put it on your site. If you don’t, please tell us why.
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