DVTimes

Do sponsors bother with RSS feeds for blogs these days?

And do people still use them?

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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With that said, to answer your question initially, it is our opinion that yes, RSS "seems' dead - as an old, out of date, legacy phenomenon that had its heyday, but if you could imagine what can be done with it, I, along with my cohorts, disagree that it should be ignored as an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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Goethe

Not a good idea these days. Search engines just see it as duplicate content and penalise your site accordingly. You also just generate a mass of outbound links with 'usually' no decent anchor text.

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yes

Tinara

This is not true. You obviously don't know about 'nofollow'?? Of course you do. You can conquer the infamous 'nofollow' scare tactic by a simple custom script or plugin in a matter of an hour or two. OR, you can stick with the norm, which is not to be so obsessed with what the google-machine tells you, and rely on generating a broader traffic scope. Outbound has been around since the inception of the net. Big G-Man is simply preaching to you about the adult business, which is now a good practice but still not implemented in the slightest across the board. Many still ignore it, and still retain their SE ranking.

When Mr. Bigshot from the G-Machine gave his advice on the last 2 updates, it was geared specifically to the adult side, so everyone panicked, and now don't want to be a site with nothing but outbound affiliate links. (btw, this was advice during the lecture too). So we just wrote a simple script and nofollowed everything. This would include links to even mainstream sites. This is simply used so that the cute little computer god (Mr. AL) can visit you & can then judge your site on content, and not just a huge link dump like sites used to be years ago. RSS does not apply if you want to apply a nofollow rule to those outbounds too. So what? The RSS survivors that I mention above, are well written, and attended to properly and carefully with regard to best practice (and therefore, we don't mind giving them the yummy juice that they deserve.), unlike badly written feeds - no matter what kind of feed they decide to use. Having 'some' affiliate links is a good thing. The bulk of mainstream is fine with it too. Think Amazon. Is a plumber's site with a few outbound affiliate links to plumbing supplies going to be penalized by the Goog. No. Is a writer's book site with some outbound links to Barnes & Noble to a shit ton of cool books going to be penalized by the G-Machine? No. He might have 50! outbound affiliate links, no direct outbound, all anchored wrong, with only a 2000 word count site. Is he penalized? No.

And when you speak plural engines above, you might just mean singular engine, namely Google. Don't put MicroYahoo into that equation, because they are a different monster altogether with old school algorithms. Moreover, RSS is output differently if you would view source to see. Especially when it's applied correctly (in a CMS e.g.) Have you thought of that?

RSS is still used in mainstream media & news agencies around the world, and you're gonna post that one would get penalized? For RSS? Less than 10% of the online population is on twitter, yet everyone thinks the world is on it. This is not true in the slightest, and yet 90-95% of all sports, news, blogs, software, financial institutional sites around the globe still process/trade information via feeds. Especially in the financial sector. Are they penalized too? No. Is this 'duplicate' content. Yes. But not. Because it's distinguishable as RSS. A trading/share 'source' of information.

Algorithms distinguish between 'duplicate' content and feeds. They are apples & oranges. If you steal my site by duplicating it. I shut you down at the ISP level. On the other hand, if you RSS my site through appropriate means and method, you 'stream' my informational source, you do not get penalized for that. It's a feed of information, common for professional mainstream bloggers since way back. In 2005, I used to stream 5-6 girls through my site, it was no big deal, and great for content. I think you are mistaking the meaning of 'duplicate' content here, versus 'copying' content - which is distinguishable by Mr. AL Gore Rhythm.

And re: anchor text, you said above, "'usually' no decent anchor text." We don't incorporate anchor text any longer. Anchor text is dead and bad, bad, bad, like mom's telling you to eat your vegetables when you were a kid. And the almighty king Mr. G says it's a no no now too. So what do you mean by this? Unless you are living two years ago without any new information? ALL mainstream sports, news, software sites have moved away from it as well for the most part. When you say, decent anchor text. What?? Plain & simple, you should never follow the now infamous "word on top of the word" rule. Let's use, for example, a site, iamastupididiot. This should not anchor to IM A STUPID IDIOT. No. Those days are over. And Mr. G-Lecture guy made that known. AND he was directly talking to the adult industry. Instead, the site, iamastupididiot should now anchor to something different, like, BECAUSE I SUCK MY MOMS ASSJUICE. This way, they are distinguishable. So, e.g., if this domain was available, you can purchase it and only utilize that particular anchor text to promote it. And not just, I AM A STUPID IDIOT. Because that would get you penissized. And would page rank the site at just a 2 at most. Better to anchor it to 'BECAUSE I SUCK MY MOMS ASSJUICE'. This would better suit the needs of the vrooom vrooom engines you mention above.

It's not fair to scare newcomers into believing something that you have not fully investigated, or maybe don't know too much about and were just ass uming.

I get that. Really, I do.

<3
Tinara

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ClaireMonroe

If you use the RSS to import the data as a draft and then you save and upload all the images with different names, tags, and alts. Then you change the title and content to match whatever your site is about as long as it stays with the theme. The only link you have pointing back at the affiliate is the actual affiliate code in a keyword then how is this a bad thing? How would they even know it was from an rss feed?

That's much easier than uploading all of the content by hand or importing it and hoping that it works. Can BYG tell the difference?

Tinara

Hi Ms Claire. Yes, we have a friend that does this, and he had his programmer write him a script for ease of use. We, on the other hand in the past, as well as now, just throw them into an offline aggregator that feeds them online. Meaning, we don't use an online service. We randomize them, so the end user sees them differently for better variety.

In your case study above, I would just simply do a write up just as a post, instead of changing 'everything' as you say. Seems like just as much work. Or, in our case, we use a news scroller to achieve the same result. Like this: First, - Feeds --> Aggregator --> Randomize --> News Scroller.

As I mention, it does not bother the engines because it's distinguishable as an RSS (Atom, XML, etc.), and that's not a scary thing. In your case, why not just accept the feed as is?

You know, like all of us, there are still emails after emails from current sponsors that, to this day, will include accompanying text to their galleries. Pretty odd, given the new best practice principles everyone's roaring about, dont'cha think? The sponsors would have it that affiliates use their included text, which then falls under the HTML of duplicate content. But this was back in the old days, and a no no now.

I think what you are talking about is simply overkill paranoia IMHO. I'd just run with the RSS as-is. No biggy.

However, your idea from above is the ultimate success to make it truly unique text, I still think it's a bit of laborious work just for such small content needs. Also, when you had said, "The only link you have pointing back at the affiliate is the actual affiliate code." What you meant to say was, "The only link you have pointing back at the SPONSOR is the actual affiliate code." I'm sure this is what you meant to say.

Either way, it stands as it stands. My examples above for mainstream still apply to adult. RSS feeds are to be differentiated and be treated as apples growing on an orange tree branch. And that's NOT a no no, nor is it a bad thing.

And to answer your question can BYG tell? B&Y can't and don't care Al Gore Rhythmically speaking. Mr. G-od only differentiates the two as separate entities altogether via the hard code output - i.e., the final resulting source code.

If you need anything, you can email me at iamthecamgirl <at> gmail. I'd be happy to help if I can. I'm sooper busy, but if it's quick, I'll help you out if possible. Skype is ultimately better 4 me. I can also let you know the two surviving RSS sponsors in our quest to find anyone left still willing to get their shit together and provide nice RSS feeds.



<3
T

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ClaireMonroe

I've got a couple as well that I'll dig up and email to you. Some I don't believe even put out content anymore

I asked one why they didn't use a feed and all they responded with was "just import the FHG's". I don't think they realize how much easier it is to import an RSS feed and manually change it after.

Tinara

Ah, yes I see now. You are talking about just the importation of the feed for content. That is why you got the response you did. Sure, we have done this to, e.g., take over about 10 WP installs entirely.

What I think the OP meant, and what I took it for, was the old blogging aspect of delivering news/promotional/updates type of feeds that one would see in news scrollers e.g. Our application is within widgets. But either way, sponsors do not much care anymore about them, and that is ok. It's just nice to see a few that still offer them that actually look good. 2 of the others were just terrible looking in their output, and really were a bit embarrassing.

<3
T

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ClaireMonroe

oh i do that as well. why not? when i used to do it on a vanilla blog i ran it bumped up the ratings with keywords i didn't even anticipate.

tonyparra

feeds + cyberseo plugin made me some cash over the years ...not alot but some

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fetishwealth

Nice detailed review of programs featured.
Can you please see if our feeds are usable as per your needs. Hit me on icq if you need anything changed so they work for you. We use wojs plugin so if they are bad we can just blame him hehehe...

NoWhErE

Hi, over at Amateurpayouts.com and Cashbang.com I've got hosted video and embeded video RSS feeds.

They are not blog feeds persay, but they all contain a title, description, name of model, HQ thumbnail and video. Lots can be done with that.

We can provide them in RSS, XML and Dump formats and all are updated regularly.

I can also create custom formats for those that need their RSS/XML feeds in a specific format.

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tequillashot

Any other sponsors offer RSS feeds?