Related Posts in Feeds are Clutter?
Posted on February 28, 2007
6 Comments
There’s an interesting post over at JohnTP.com pondering if adding related posts to feeds is considered clutter. He also has a poll up. (Go vote!).
As the author of some “Add Related Posts to Feed” WordPress plugins, you can imagine that this caught my eye. I, personally (and obviously) think this sort of thing is generally a good idea.
My hope is that it gives new subscribers something to explore, a way to learn about other articles. In other words, perhaps it makes a site a bit “stickier.” I theorize that subscribers that have been around for a while will just ignore it — just like they do ads.
Digression: I am not a big fan of monetizing feeds. Want to sell ads? Sweet! For me, that means hoping the folks the show up via searches will help subsidize things a bit. It just doesn’t seem right to push ads on the folks who want to read my stuff daily though. Perhaps I’m overly naive?
But I digress… back on topic:
Can it get out of hand? Sure. It is all too easy to toss everything and the kitchen sink at the tail end of each article in a feed. I swear, some guys have way more “stuff” after the article than they do in the article itself. Yuck. In that situation, related posts just doesn’t buy anything. They’ll never be seen. The reader tuned them out along with all the other gunk.
Say, did you notice my related posts plugins don’t do anything if the feed is sending excerpts? Heh, I’ll spare you my rant on excerpts for another day…
All that is lead up to this question: What do you think about Related Posts in the feed?
Those that subscribe here have seen ‘em for a few weeks now. I think my avg. uniques/day has gone up a small bit (I don’t dare attempt to quantify that on just a couple weeks sample.) Doesn’t seem to be cheezing any one off…
Leave a comment here or over on the JohnTP article (and do be sure to read the comments already there). I’d really like some feedback!
Tags: clutter, feed, JohnTP.com, Related-Posts, rss
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6 Responses to “Related Posts in Feeds are Clutter?”
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I don’t consider them clutter. I consider them added value and I use them. I just used some today to find the thing I just blogged about. I find a lot that way. If the original post is a dud sometimes the gems are in the ‘related’ especially if it’s an author I usually like… sometimes they have an off day and need to 2.0 a post.
Yes. If I sign up to a feed it’s because I like the writing of the blogger. If I like the writing it’s because I’ve read what they’ve written before. Therefore, it’s a probability that I have already read much of what they’ve previously written. I don’t need to see links to the same posts again.
Re: Your digression: What I can’t believe is the amount of advertising that JohnTP has in his blog. I tell ya, it’s one of the quickest ways to get me to leave a website. When the Google Ads interrupt the flow of the article
http://www.converstations.com/2007/03/truncated_conve.html
I found a post I thought you may find interesting on truncated feeds that make the reader click through that you can link to when you decide to make a post on the subject.
We’d recently talked about it ourselves via IM. Must be something in the air. neh?
@Collin - See, there’s the rub. We’re a bit different. I’m much more casual about adding feeds. I find an article from an author on a new blog (that I like) I’ll sub to the feed. Then I’ll decide if I’m keeping it as the articles come in.
But I definitely can see it from your angle too. Almost makes me wish there were an easy way to add two versions of the same feed: One “enhanced” with related posts and one not.
And perhaps there is… something to ponder.
@Rich - wow, that’s a great analogy. And yes, that’s kinda spooky considering how recently we chatted about that!
Thanks for the link!
I forgot:
Yeah, I must confess I strongly dislike ads “in” the article too.