Is it possible that the users who used to find us through Google are now satisfied with AI chat summaries and no longer feel the need to click through to the actual page?
Meanwhile, the long-time users who subscribed via RSS are still showing up like they always have. If this is the case, it’s a bit of a sad reality for content creators.
There's a ton of selection bias going on here. Terence writes mostly about open web standards and topics that would be of significant interest to folks with an RSS feed reader.
Also, RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read. Like a podcast "listen" is actually just an automated download, RSS traffic does not necessarily involve anyone actually reading the article, whereas search traffic is generally high intent and is at least resulting in eyeballs on the site, if not actual readers.
> RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read
They try to address that
> I added RSS and Newsletter tracking. These data are very lossy. If someone is subscribed to my RSS feed and opens a post and their client downloads a lazy-loaded image at the end of the post, I get a hit.
Is it possible that the users who used to find us through Google are now satisfied with AI chat summaries and no longer feel the need to click through to the actual page?
Meanwhile, the long-time users who subscribed via RSS are still showing up like they always have. If this is the case, it’s a bit of a sad reality for content creators.
There's a ton of selection bias going on here. Terence writes mostly about open web standards and topics that would be of significant interest to folks with an RSS feed reader.
Also, RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read. Like a podcast "listen" is actually just an automated download, RSS traffic does not necessarily involve anyone actually reading the article, whereas search traffic is generally high intent and is at least resulting in eyeballs on the site, if not actual readers.
> RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read
They try to address that
> I added RSS and Newsletter tracking. These data are very lossy. If someone is subscribed to my RSS feed and opens a post and their client downloads a lazy-loaded image at the end of the post, I get a hit.
Ranked yesterday, although not much discussion (18 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022560