January 29, 2009
Not having a newsfeed will not help you Comments Off
I understand that you’re a struggling artist with a (very cool) niche webcomic. You’re just trying to get by, and many people have told you that the more eyeballs you can get to your site, the more attractive it will be to advertisers, and the more money you can make by selling ads on the site. That right? Did I miss anything?
Good, because you did. Depending on the tools you’re using, it’s anywhere from possible to disgustingly easy to enable the same “monetizing tools” you use on your website on a newsfeed. The part where said tools don’t do much for you unless you’re already getting a lot of traffic (like, say, Penny Arcade) is another post entirely.
Once upon a time, when teh internets were small, people would bookmark websites and visit them with regularity, hoping for new stuff. Then we got lots of websites that we wanted to keep up with, and manually checking different sites for new content got unwieldy.
Enter RSS, which lets you tell everyone when you have new content. You don’t *have* to put the content in the feed itself (though it’s nice if you do), you can just use it as an announcement service (like S*P). Without a newsfeed, you might get my eyeballs once every other month. With a newsfeed, you can get my eyeballs every time you post new work. That’s a good thing, right?
Finally, not running a newsfeed will in no way keep people from stealing, misappropriating, scraping, leeching, or otherwise doing things with your content that you’d prefer they not do. No, it really will not stop them. This is the internet and sometimes people just suck.