There’s a mini-hullabolu happening (don’t you just love Techmeme on the weekends!) over the emergence of Shyftr, a new service where you can read blog posts and comment on them.
The discussion centres around whether this is content theft given the content and the conversation are both happening somewhere other than your blog. No doubt, it’s an intriguing issue given the emergence of RSS as popular, although not yet ubiquitous distribution and consumption vehicle, and social aggregators, are changing the role that blogs play.
You can get “the dirt” on Shyftr from Louis Gray, Tony Hung and Mathew Ingram but the angle that I want to explore is whether all the activity happening outside someone’s blog is making page views irrelevant.
Let’s face, most bloggers are stat whores – checking several times a day to see the number of page views for their latest masterpiece. Many of us are also feed junkies on the notion that the more RSS subscribers, the better.
The reality, however, is RSS and social aggregators such as Shyftr could see the traffic on many blogs decline dramatically. This is bad news if you’re into page views and worse news if you want to generate any kind of advertising revenue. I can already tell you that this blog generates, at best, a modest number of page views as most people get the content through an RSS reader.
In some ways, it’s frustrating because you want people to come into your “home” and see what you’ve done with the place (e.g. a use-friendly design, cool widgets, an interesting blogroll, etc.) But the reality is the action is happening outside the house so what are you going to do?
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Are Pageviews Still Relevant for Bloggers?
There’s a mini-hullabolu happening (don’t you just love Techmeme on the weekends!) over the emergence of Shyftr, a new service where you can read blog posts and comment on them.
The discussion centres around whether this is content theft given the content and the conversation are both happening somewhere other than your blog. No doubt, it’s an intriguing issue given the emergence of RSS as popular, although not yet ubiquitous distribution and consumption vehicle, and social aggregators, are changing the role that blogs play.
You can get “the dirt” on Shyftr from Louis Gray, Tony Hung and Mathew Ingram but the angle that I want to explore is whether all the activity happening outside someone’s blog is making page views irrelevant.
Let’s face, most bloggers are stat whores – checking several times a day to see the number of page views for their latest masterpiece. Many of us are also feed junkies on the notion that the more RSS subscribers, the better.
The reality, however, is RSS and social aggregators such as Shyftr could see the traffic on many blogs decline dramatically. This is bad news if you’re into page views and worse news if you want to generate any kind of advertising revenue. I can already tell you that this blog generates, at best, a modest number of page views as most people get the content through an RSS reader.
In some ways, it’s frustrating because you want people to come into your “home” and see what you’ve done with the place (e.g. a use-friendly design, cool widgets, an interesting blogroll, etc.) But the reality is the action is happening outside the house so what are you going to do?
Technorati Tags: Blogs, RSS, Shyftr