Who Knew?

Recently, my snarky celebrity blog of choice (“The Superficial”) decided to truncate its RSS feed, and like most people who read feeds on a daily basis, I was pretty annoyed. But after thinking it over, I’m of the opinion that this change actually turns out to be a net positive for me as a reader. Since The Superficial is a celebrity blog, most of its entries are pretty vapid and devoid of any real content, so I usually read only 30% of the entries on any given day (skipping over the bikini posts, anything about Lindsay Lohan, etc.). I’m sure they decided to truncate the feed to drive more pageviews to the website, but it’s allowed me to skip the drivel faster and only click on the more interesting posts (not pictured above). I guess the lesson here is that if you care about producing quality content, keep your feeds in full. If you’re totally aware of the fact that you’re producing trash to be used as a guilty pleasure, maybe truncating your feed is a good idea so that your users can skip past what they don’t want to hear about.

Recently, my snarky celebrity blog of choice (“The Superficial”) decided to truncate its RSS feed, and like most people who read feeds on a daily basis, I was pretty annoyed. But after thinking it over, I’m of the opinion that this change actually turns out to be a net positive for me as a reader.

Since The Superficial is a celebrity blog, most of its entries are pretty vapid and devoid of any real content, so I usually read only 30% of the entries on any given day (skipping over the bikini posts, anything about Lindsay Lohan, etc.). I’m sure they decided to truncate the feed to drive more pageviews to the website, but it’s allowed me to skip the drivel faster and only click on the more interesting posts (not pictured above).

I guess the lesson here is that if you care about producing quality content, keep your feeds in full. If you’re totally aware of the fact that you’re producing trash to be used as a guilty pleasure, maybe truncating your feed is a good idea so that your users can skip past what they don’t want to hear about.

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