Should You Stop Promoting Your RSS Feed?

When I first launched my other blog way back in 2006, I didn’t even know that WordPress existed. Twitter was still in its early development stages and Instagram was still a full four years away. To say that a lot has changed would be a severe understatement.

And that’s the thing about making money online. The environment and technology continue to change at a breakneck pace and you need to keep up with the times if you want to enjoy any semblance of success. You can’t simply sit on your laurels and keep doing the same old thing. We’ve come to assume that most major businesses, particularly of the online variety, will have an official Facebook page, for example.

Back in 2006, we’d also assume that just about every blog and online magazine that we read would have an RSS feed to which we could subscribe. It was the best way to stay on top of all the newest updates without having to visit each of our favorite sites individually. But as social media continues to rise and other curation services come to the forefront, more and more people are declaring the death of RSS.

I disagree. While I will admit that RSS subscriptions may not be used as much now as before the death of Google Reader in 2013, and while I will admit that RSS doesn’t play as prominent a role in current conversations surrounding Internet marketing as it once did, it’s still very much relevant to the people who do use it. And I’m not alone in this assessment either.

Guy McDowell of MakeUseOf.com published an article earlier this year outlining some of the key figures in relation to RSS usage on the Internet today. He mentions how Feedly has seen a 900% increase in revenue in the last two years, for example, and how the Feedly app for Android has been downloaded over 1.5 million times. He mentions how over 2,000 of the top 10,000 websites on the web publish RSS feeds and over 22,000 of the top 100,000 sites do too.