Tinara

This is your Lucky day Mr. DV Guy - It's funny you mention this, as I was just sending through a reply to another thread, and this thread appeared at the top as I was leaving the site.

I will tell you that on our end, it has been an exhausting & TEDIOUS experience trying to find exactly what you ask about as my boss was insisting on utilizing RSS in the new portfolio of sites this time around. Here is what we found:

Our 6-month long(!) search & investigation (and we had many meetings about this very topic) has turned up these final results on our end:

* - Out of 23 sponsors/companies, only 4 of them worked.

* - Out of these 23 companies, 9 were notified directly by us that their feeds were broken

* - Out of the 4 that did work, only 2 looked good enough to actually use in Feed Reads (widgets, scrollers, etc.)

* - Out of the 9 notified that were broken, only 4 responders said they would fix them.

* - They didn't.

* - Out of the 23 listed above, 7 of them went to 404.

* - Final result, the 2 lucky companies that kept their shit together by still offering working, functional, nice looking RSS feeds will debut in the coming months across 179 sites and get all that traffic.

With that said, to answer your question initially, it is our opinion that yes, RSS "seems' dead - as an old, out of date, legacy phenomenon that had its heyday, but if you could imagine what can be done with it, I, along with my cohorts, disagree that it should be ignored as an advertising tool. In fact, there is no demand for it by affiliates, because the new breed of affiliate are an unknowledgeable bunch and have high-hope deadend dreams of grandeur. IMO, I simply think that it's being ignored just like all the other dead sponsors that gave up on the industry after the porn-crash.

(...on a sidenote re: sponsors: when we started this monumental project almost exactly 2 years ago, we had 478 sponsors across CCBill alone (this is NOT even including the NATS sponsors! Which brings is into the 1000+ realm), and now in just two short years, 263 are dead, near-death, 404 or completely dissolved those of which we are decided on just 72 extremely strong ones - That's 478 down to 72. Then note the RSS facts above.)

I think, in my past experience, that RSS is a missed opportunity for sponsors. Think about it. If you can feed an updated list of information to your visitors, with us as affiliates exposing that information on an updated basis, then why wouldn't this tool still be used? Because there just aren't that many true affiliates with true sites anymore, compared to yesteryear. They are get-rich-quick-scheming, distrustful assfucks who quickly realize that money does not fall from trees overnight like it used to.

I think it's laziness and the overall current depressed environment that sponsor's are feeling. It's like they just say, RSS is dead, so why use it. Well, it's also the affiliate's fault because everything is so tube oriented now, and there are far less affiliates on the scene nowadays (while some noobies not even knowing WTF RSS even is(!).

We gave every opportunity to the sponsors to ask, request and notify them of their RSS feeds, and from the stats above, you can see that most do not care. There was even one sponsor who hacked his RSS feeds so that the affiliate would not get credited with the sale. This was exposed by us, and of course he is not being used. That particular sponsor is NOT in the statistics above, because he was the pariah in the bunch. His scheme was to alter the code in such a way, that it would filter through the process to the landing page (signup page) where no affiliate code remained.

This was found by our lead tech, and so this sponsor will simply miss out of a potential of huge traffic, and lost sales.

Finally, I don't think RSS is dead. But if no one uses something, it appears dead, right? If you are a good company/sponsor that keeps all available tools at an affiliate's disposal, then why ignore any of them? All sponsors love to proclaim & shout about their signup options, and how many this-and-that they have, but if you ignore a really cool tool like RSS (just the logical genius of it) then you ignore another tool that active affiliates will maybe find a way to use and therefore, get more signups.

It's funny for me to see all the morons on here preaching that this is dead, or that is dead. Blogs are dead, RSS is dead. The industry is dead, TGPs are dead. Blah, blah, blah.

This is fine for the working experienced affiliate. Because it means less fish in the pond. Whereas in the old days, before the crash, everything was great, and whoo hoo for everything.

Here's a message to all the little wolves out there: One day, we will get a signup or two from those lonely sad depressed little RSS feeds, the lucky 2 survivors that made it to our widget, and one day, one of those signups will be a whale.

Remember, the ocean is a big place. There are little cute fish, medium size fish, adorable shrimp, lobsters, big fish, octopuses, dolphins, cute little seals, and then, my friend, there are also whales. And all the great and grand whale needs is one tiny bite on the right hook, and that hook might just be the wonderful genius of an RSS feed.

<3
T


PS - To any sponsors that have me on their Skype already (or one of us at the company) and offer RSS, PLEASE feel free to tell me. Because after all the investigations, we actually might've missed you, and the fact that you are NOT 1 of the 2 that survived our audit of the RSS feeds actually available. And then there are some of you currently working directly with me that I maybe have notified of broken feeds, and now you might reconsider fixing them after reading my post.

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