Molly White recently wrote about how publications are moving to publishing newsletters because their search traffic is dwindling. One downside to us readers is that managing a bunch of newsletter subscriptions creates a lot of clog in our inboxes.
She then goes on to detail how she uses RSS to create her own “newspapers”. Which frees her up to read whenever she’d like and keeps her inbox clean.
[…] at least I could choose when to read the news, go to the newspaper and get my fill, and then put it away. No pings in the middle of my workday pulling my focus away from my writing. No notifications during my planned relaxation time, alerting me to some new horror. No threats to my inbox zero, requiring me to choose between staring neurotically at the unread emails notification or marking an email as read only to lose it forever. Maybe there was something to be said for the newspaper.
I’ve been doing something similar for years. I have a “Newsletter” folder in NetNewswire and, rather than sign up to newsletters via email, I subscribe to them with RSS. In fact, if they don’t have an RSS feed I seldom subscribe. I love reading the posts that I have in NetNewswire and do so nearly every morning for over 20 years!
But it isn’t all perfect.
As Molly also mentioned, some publishers have no idea they are also publishing an RSS feed. This is an issue because many publishers use their stats to sell ads. So the more people that subscribe to an RSS feed without the publisher knowing, the less their analytics show their true reach.
Like Molly I wish more people used RSS. It isn’t as easy as following someone on a social network (it should be) but it isn’t much harder either. Her post describes how to get set up.
If you have a website of any kind, check to see if you have an RSS feed for your posts. If you don’t, see if you can enable one. And then, add a /subscribe page to your site and explain RSS to your readers. Help more people learn about RSS.