Publishers will make or break RSS, not readers

Has anyone got any links to "influential" tech bloggers claiming RSS is dead? I know there has been a lot of fuss about it with google touting "dwindling users", yet I still haven't seen any such claims laid out in this article. Did I miss the boat / was I simply oblivious to such nonsense?

I also question google and their trite "dwindling numbers" excuse. They've downplayed reader ever since the bootstrap-esque debut of their "stupid bar" its been in the dropdown, even though it is the only thing I ever used/use the "stupid bar" for. This may be my tinfoil hat speaking but something tells me this spring clean has more to do with promoting google+ / fostering real page views (ad views) than anything else.

RSS is trivial to implement, and there's considerable value in having a machine-readable version of a publication. New media consumption tools often rely on RSS to get started at the very least, and letting your competitors get a leg up when the new hotness comes around isn't good for business. Publishers who drop RSS do so at their own peril.

I choose to not believe this, and live in the delusion that someone will create a hacked version of a Google Reader-like API for the sake of saving people time. Possibly and hopefully tldr.io does.

Great article! Thanks Julien

Don't hold your breath waiting for legacy media to announce and explain why they are dropping RSS support. Now that GReader is done, they have the PR cover to do it...watch!

"The Price of Information

The way I view the structure of the news industry is much more simple than the complexity everyone perceives.  You have corporate (social group) information producers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today that gather, assimilate, translate, interpret, print and distribute information.  The defining characteristic is not the flavor of the information produced, but that they are all selling bundled products.

On the other hand, you have the blogosphere that is gathering, assimilating, translating, interpreting and selling content independently.  The closest thing to a common distribution network in the blogosphere is the RSS feed.  There are many bloggers in the finance industry selling subscriptions at and beyond the price of print publications, so we know a paid market for information can exist in the Internet ecosystem.  The remainder of bloggers are giving their information product away to maximize page views and the corresponding advertising revenue."

http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=68