Why RSS Newsfeed Aggregation Can Save You Time and Money

Do RSS aggregators offer a viable means for finding news, saving time, or even making money?

In the fall of 2006, Kathleen Gilroy, CEO of the Otter Group, presented a day-long boot camp to introduce people to a new paradigm for working in the networked information economy.

In one of the camp's workshops, entitled The Feed You Need, Gilroy discussed RSS, including how to set up filters in your RSS aggregator and capture and republish critical information. Before the camp, Gilroy asked me about my experiences with using RSS for business, as well as what I perceived to be the key advantages of this technology.

Below you'll find my original feedback, written from the perspective of someone who has explored, tested, and used RSS not just for personal consumption but also to create and test new business opportunities.

How do you manage RSS feeds?

I have been using multiple tools to manage all of my RSS feeds for a long time: Bloglines to aggregate and read my favorite feeds; Technorati to search for feeds and their related folksonomy tags, Blogdigger Groups, PubSub, Carp, Feedroll, Feed Digest, and many others to create effective news radars on specific themes.

Today, I have greatly reduced the number of these tools I use, as my available time has decreased and new Web services and technologies are available. For feed discovery, gathering, aggregation, filtering, and publication I now use MySyndicaat, a great new Web-based service [that, as of August 2006 was] still in early Beta stages, but is nonetheless showing many uniquely valuable features for the "news-mastering" [the selection, aggregation, filtering, and editing of RSS-based aggregated news streams] type of work I do.

On the other hand, there are now a good number of sites (for example, TechMeme) that do the filtering and selection for me on specific topics, which I use as my reference sources instead of scanning the hundreds of individual sources that they tap into.

How many feeds do you have in your aggregator?

There are about 250 feeds in my aggregator, and these include searches for both original authors as well as persistent searches on specific search engines that are RSS friendly. But it should be noted that while the overall number of feeds I subscribe to increases steadily, the number of actual aggregated newsfeeds I look at every day remains unchanged. What this means is that, thanks to the ability of these RSS aggregators to aggregate into one news stream (my selection of specific sources and persistent searches), I expand the sources that I tap into, but the topic channels I follow remain the same.

And for those of you worrying that each new additional source adds more reading time, I submit the following:

1. Not all sources publish every day.
2. Filtering techniques now allow me to eliminate duplicates (posts on the same topic) and to exclude any news post that doesn't match the very specific criteria I have set.

Thus, the news stream gradually gets better without becoming proportionally richer in the number of news items to read.

How do you manage your RSS feeds in terms of persistent searches, adding new material, and finding good material?

Persistent searches are the bread-and-butter of talented news-masters, and using them makes for a major difference in the quality of results you can get. The basic secret I have discovered is not to use broad searches but multiple, very fine, specific search queries, so as to limit as much as possible the non-relevant stuff. Good queries are always at least two words long, and focusing on the title or very first paragraph certainly increases the relevance of what you may find.

In terms of finding new material, new sources, and valuable new additions to my collection of RSS feeds, all I need to do is look in the fine net that my persistent searches invisibly create for any and all of the new news sources or blogs that have started posting content on my selected topic.

How much time do you spend each day reading?

My scanning of the news headlines on all the topics that I follow (please consider that I am no normal user in this respect, as I directly manage three Web sites and over 25 different topic themes within them) takes about an hour and a half each day. This is now a lot more efficient and less time-consuming than it used to be, when not only did I have to navigate out to several different Web sites but I also had to cut and paste each item worthy of interest or comment. Now, everything happens in one place, and while I browse and select my preferred news stories, I can also save, bookmark, edit, annotate, and even republish them.

How do you save good links?

I use de.licio.us, and I find it a truly valuable tool for archiving, referencing, resource discovery, and even for syndicating and republishing stuff that is of interest to me.

I would recommend that everyone learn and use de.licio.us, and I would make it a required topic in any new media or online journalism class.

Can you quantify how much time and money this saves you and how much business it has yielded?

RSS has positively saved me thousands of hours of manual work, and it has given me opportunities that I had not even imagined possible a few years ago. The RSS benefits that I appreciate the most and which have given the most return for my investment are:

1. Reach: Extension of my reach, visibility, and exposure online. Thanks to the number of popular RSS aggregators and the many RSS search engines and directories out there, it is now much easier for many to find out about me and become my readers.
2. Accessibility: Loyal readers can get all my breaking news without having to come to my site each time.
3. Syndication: Republishing my content on other sites, hubs, and portals is now very easy. Partners, international editions, and supporters can easily syndicate any and all of my news headlines on other Web sites.
4. Information Discovery: Finding highly relevant breaking news on the topics I research and work on is now much more manageable and less time-consuming thanks to RSS and the new technologies that allow me to aggregate only what I am interested in.
5. New Business Opportunities: RSS news-mastering, or the ability to aggregate, filter and compile topic-specific news digests, has opened up several interesting opportunities to create quality new services while extracting good revenue from them. The same goes for feed sponsorship and ad integration. While I am not particularly in favor of this last one, there are specific instances and formats of RSS ad integration that will yield good results.

Can you share your total time savings and earnings generated by having adopted RSS?

This is a difficult question to answer, as making reliable and publishable calculations is always a source of debate. But, since there is no gain or understanding unless we share a bit more of what we know, here are the numbers and unpretending calculations I gave Kathleen:

• Time Savings: Two hours per day at $50 an hour for at least two consecutive years = 50 x 2 x 6 (workdays a week) = $600 x 52 (weeks in a year) = $ 31,200 x 2 (years) = $62,400, or 1,152 saved hours (144 days!) of my time.
• Earnings: Since I only utilize RSS in a very limited way for direct revenue, it is much more difficult to calculate this one.
• Sponsorships of RSS Feeds: $2,000 to $3,500 a year.

Indirect earnings due to extra visibility, exposure, and consequent increased relevant traffic are more difficult to calculate. What I can estimate is all based on my present Web and RSS traffic stats.

Today's official stats count gives me well above 10,000 unique Web visitors a day across my three main sites, and about 8,000 to 9,000 RSS readers across the same online properties on an average day. Let's assume that, of those 8,000 to 9,000 RSS readers, only 10 percent or fewer will click through to see a full story on one of my Web sites (though I think that percentage is much higher).

How much would these click-throughs influence my site earnings? Given that Web readers on my sites have an average click-through rate of about 12 percent (very high), I could assume that about 80 to 100 RSS readers are directly clicking and influencing my contextual advertising-based earnings on a daily basis.

How much would that account for? $15 to $20 a day, or $100 a week. That is about $5,000 a year, or $10,000 over the last two years. Considering that I have no advertising manager or anyone dedicated to capitalizing on or promoting the several moneymaking opportunities I could extract from RSS sponsorship of news feeds and in particular of thematic news radars, this could be very easily doubled or tripled with little extra effort.

Total RSS-related earnings: $ 8,000 a year.