{"id":1241,"date":"2008-12-19T21:33:37","date_gmt":"2008-12-20T02:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=1241"},"modified":"2008-12-19T21:33:37","modified_gmt":"2008-12-20T02:33:37","slug":"on-mobile-readership-and-partial-rss-feeds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2008\/12\/19\/on-mobile-readership-and-partial-rss-feeds","title":{"rendered":"On mobile readership, and partial RSS feeds"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been meaning to write my thoughts down on this for a while. Its on RSS feeds, and mobile readers (two separate issues). Spurred, largely today, thanks to a post titled: You can’t afford to lose mobile readers<\/a>. The author is right – you can’t.<\/p>\n

Mobile readers<\/b>
\nWhile I don’t think sites need to be optimised for 800×600, largely because I think we’ve moved from the days on the Web where this was a necessity (what’s next, going back to the colour safe web palette? ;-)), I do think a mobile alternative to a site should be available.<\/p>\n

WordPresss has plugins – the author mentions MobilePress and WPTouch. I’ve never used either, but I use the WordPress Mobile Edition<\/a> by Alex King – in time, I’ll probably play with the other WordPress plugins. <\/p>\n

Its nice to know that sites like Tumblr just have a mobile version available right there. <\/p>\n

Note the bit about Flash. Most (if not all) Nuffnang ads tend to be flash based. You’ve just lost some ad readership.<\/p>\n

RSS feeds<\/b>
\nMy pet peeve? Partial\/excerpt RSS feeds. This is just plain silly<\/b>. If you think people are going to click on to go and visit your site to view advertisements, you cannot be further from correct. If I’m savvy<\/i> enough to be reading RSS feeds, I am almost certainly going to be using some form of ad blocker – if not via Adblock Plus<\/a>, via some other method to not see ads.<\/p>\n

If you’re worried about losing ad revenue, consider RSS feed ads. I don’t know what the click-through-ratio is, but I’m seeing more and more of them pop up nowadays. They’re a minor annoyance, I don’t block them, but I don’t actually click on them, either.<\/p>\n

And why are partial RSS feeds bad? Because if I’m reading it on my mobile device (say, the E71 or an iPod Touch), I’m very unlikely to want to click to open another window and load your blog entry. I’ll just skip it. Skipping it is worse than showing full feeds…<\/p>\n

Conclusions<\/b><\/p>\n