STANDING OUT IN A COMMODITY CROWD
This week, as the number of RSS feeds I subscribe to crossed 150 (accounting for several hundred posts a day and at least an hour of reading time), I took a moment to look at what I've signed up for and why. — Aside from a few purely information feeds …
Context & Ripple Effects
At the height of the mid-2000s blogging boom, RSS turned every publisher into a syndicated commodity — the same open pipe carried everyone's output into the same reader. This piece sits inside a cluster of same-week debates about what that pipe should carry: whether feeds should be full-text or truncated, how to surface value from an overflowing OPML list of subscriptions, and who actually owns the audience relationship and its numbers. The longer arc matters: a decade-plus later, retrospectives argued RSS lost out to centralized corporate silos despite being open — and this 2005 anxiety about indistinguishable feeds is an early symptom of why.
First-order effects
- Individual bloggers and small publishers face direct pressure to differentiate — with hundreds of posts arriving daily in each subscriber's reader, undifferentiated content gets skipped regardless of how many feeds someone nominally subscribes to.
- Subscription counts stop being a meaningful success metric: the constraint shifts from distribution (anyone can publish a feed) to attention (who actually reads yours), changing what creators optimize for.
Second-order effects
- Tooling and conventions emerge to cope with overload — filtering, digesting, and sampling approaches like pulling the 'best' item per feed from an OPML export — shifting value downstream toward aggregation and curation layers rather than raw publishing.
- Publishers experiment with feed design choices (full-text versus partial, exclusive versus syndicated) as levers to pull readers back to their own sites, feeding directly into the contemporaneous fight over audience metrics and ownership.
Third-order effects
- If content is commoditized at the protocol level, durable advantage migrates to whoever controls the reading experience — a dynamic that ultimately favored centralized platforms and helps explain why open RSS lost ground to corporate information silos.
- The pattern generalizes: any open, frictionless distribution standard tends to erode individual publisher differentiation, pushing the industry toward walled-garden curation unless publishers build brand-level moats on top of the commodity layer.
The trend: As open syndication standards commoditize distribution, competitive advantage steadily migrates from content creation itself to the platforms that filter and control reader attention — a shift still playing out across every feed-driven medium today.