Feedly Found a New Way to Steal Page Views From Publishers
the-digital-reader.com
the-digital-reader.com
> If you do not want to benefit form this feature, you can also sent me an email and we will quickly opt you out.
I think I will just quickly opt out as an end user by not using Feedly.
Other than those two small issues, Digg Reader is fantastic.
To Digg's favour, I do read some of their articles now (so presumably they get some ad revenue)...
Newsblur is a great alternative. The web client and Android clients are both nice to use -- no experience with iOS but I'm sure it's comparable -- and are open source, written and maintained by Samuel Clay (conesus on HN).
I pay for the service but there's a free tier as well.
On the upside, Samuel seems to be very quick to respond to issues, and pushes updates out pretty often, both to the app and to the site.
1. There is a hard limit on a number of unreads per feed, which is pretty low (100-500 depending on a feed): https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/feed_cut_off_aft...
2. When not hitting that first limitation, Items are marked as read after 30 (previously 14) days: https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/do_unread_items_...
Personally, I really like Newsblur. It's available on all the clients I care about, it's pretty fast and it's Open Source with a sane business model. I'd really like it to have search as that's the main thing that stops me finding good trends in my RSS feeds.
I was a big Google Reader user, and I found this a perfect replacement. Even has an Android App and its all synced.
While not appropriate for folks on feed caching services (FeedBurner et al), it would be interesting to write a quick script/htaccess to detect when Feedly is loading your RSS feed on-server and redirect to a custom one which includes a warning above each story about Feedly stealing page views.
Share something from the Pulse app and it generates a pulse.me link which functions as an URL shortener through a browser, but redirects to their app install page on mobile.
Sadly, stunts like these will drive even more people to publish only excerpt feeds, which is very frustrating for users and further impacts the already declining RSS ecosystem.
When I think of a publisher, I think of words on paper. Specifically a newspaper or book. As a publisher, I convey the words to some permanent form (a publication) which is then broadcast in some fashion.
The point here? I own the words. I put my name on them.
But now we're asked to believe that publishing involves some kind of deeper interaction. If I'm a publisher, I guess, I'm supposed to be creating an immersive, interactive (perhaps "sticky" or "addictive") model of content consumption. People who leave my words alone but take away my interaction with consumers are stealing my works.
This just sounds like a playground fight over who gets to be the newspaper delivery boy -- and the reason it's so important isn't because of the content, genre, or authorship of the work in question. Everybody agrees on that. This is important because content creation in 2014 is about a fight for eyeballs. Get them on the page, get them to join an email list, get them involved in the comments sections, get them coming back.
Publishers and publications, at least in the way the words have generally been used, have little to do with anything here. The fight is because everybody's looking to psychologically manipulate the poor schmuck who's reading the publication, not for any loftier reason than that.
You can bet that if you created a newspaper that was simply a selection of articles photocopied from other newspapers, you'd have IP issues. Same if you tried it with a book.
If I gave my passwords to a poor person in a third-world country, might they not consume all of my digital content online for me, summarize it, and send me what's important, in plain text format?
In the US the same case came out the other way around, holding that copies made in the process of digital aggregation didn't constitute fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press_v._Meltwater
In the US you don't need a license for the physical version, though, where you literally cut out news articles and mail an envelope of clippings to someone. Under the first-sale doctrine, you own the physical printed copy of a book, magazine, or newspaper you bought, and you can resell that copy (only) without further permission of the copyright holder. You can also modify it before resale if you'd like, since you fully own it: carve it into a book-sculpture, clip out pages and sell them independently, cut out the pages and reuse the binding, etc. You can even buy copyrighted paintings, modify them, and sell the modified version, as long as you're modifying the physical canvas you bought (not copying it onto a new canvas or making prints).
And in any case, we should not encourage bad behavior, whatever the actual impact.
These people have to stop doing this shit and realize it isn't doing anyone any good.
That is, unless you output the entire blog post on your RSS feed. If you do this, then that's your own fault.
Therefore we are left with the question. Does this harm your site and/or metrics? Short answer. No.
Are your users going to your articles from Feedly short links? Probably not. Why would you link your users to a feedly short link to begin with?
In the end, what Feedly is doing is doing a disservice to their end user. It makes the process confusing by creating more hoops to get to the original content. Those short links frankly do not need to exist.
We all know what Feedly is trying to do, and in the end they should stick to building premium features rather than something like this.
I understand the reasons against posting your entire blog on an RSS feed, but it hurts usability so much. If I'm opening my feed reader I would like to stay there and not have to continuously open a post in my browser and then jump back again. If a RSS feed does not contain the full posts I need to be extremely interested in the content to still follow it.
But honestly is something I would pay for: provide me access to your raw content (with images, tags, categories and some mark-up) so I can just present it to myself in whichever fashion I want. I'm allergic to most web design and prefer things to be plain text, now I could do that without having to reverse engineer APIs or strange deals so the content-provider still gets page clicks. You also get a whole new eco system for third party applications.
And, no, ads embedded in the RSS feed itself won't work. You can't do that with any ad network ads at all, you can only do that with manual referral links and the like. It's more time-consuming (it involves manual work for every single ad) and makes far less money.
edit: because in Feedly's case you are the product.
Guess what? If your article wasn't in my RSS, I wouldn't have read it at all. It didn't steal anything.