My content, my readers, my numbers, damnit
Hey, My Yahoo, Google Reader, Pluck, Newsgator Enterprise and other RSS readers: Hand over my numbers. You are taking my RSS feed and caching it to serve more efficiently, which would be fine if only you told me how many times you are doing that.
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2005 the RSS ecosystem is in a growth spurt — and a trust crisis. Bloggers are already fighting splogs scraping their feeds, while debates rage over whether feeds should be full-text at all (many readers prefer partial text) and who profits when intermediaries redistribute someone else's work (the monetization question raised by Signal vs. Noise). Jeff Jarvis's demand that My Yahoo, Google Reader, Pluck and NewsGator hand back subscriber counts fits squarely in this moment: publishers can't sell ads or prove reach if the readers caching their feeds report nothing.
First-order effects
- Publishers like Jarvis currently see only raw fetches from reader caches, not how many humans sit behind them — making audience measurement for RSS effectively blind until readers disclose per-feed subscriber counts.
Second-order effects
- Reader services that comply first gain publisher goodwill and better analytics partnerships, pressuring My Yahoo, Google Reader and NewsGator to standardize reporting before ad buyers dismiss RSS as unmeasurable.
Third-order effects
- If feeds become an advertising channel, opaque intermediation between publishers and audiences becomes structurally untenable — foreshadowing the same platform-vs-publisher data fight that recurs whenever distribution shifts (and one reason Reader's later fate still stings, as its own builders reflected on a decade after Google shut it down).
The trend: Every new distribution layer that sits between creators and audiences eventually faces the same reckoning over who owns the audience data.