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Articles in RSS feeds will not drive traffic from website, says Guardian development head

Posted: 28/10/08 By: Laura Oliver
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The Guardian's decision to publish full-text articles within its RSS feeds will not undermine the paper's website, the developer behind the change has said.

Subscribers to Guardian.co.uk's RSS feeds will now be able to read text content in full through a feed reader without having to visit the paper's site, following last week's launch.

It will not drive readers away from the website, Matt McAlister, head of the Guardian Developer Network, told Journalism.co.uk. Rather, the new RSS format would be complementary to Guardian.co.uk, he said.

"We want to make the Guardian more useful to people in whatever context they are in, no matter where they are online, we want the Guardian to be useful for them," said McAlister, who joined the Guardian in April from Yahoo.

"RSS is a great vehicle for making that work and it makes sense to try and fully engage them in that experience, rather than trying to drive them back to your website."

Allowing access to full articles through third party applications like RSS feed readers is part of seeing the Guardian as a service to readers and not just as a news website – a change in thinking embraced by the software industry, but neglected by media organisations, he added.

"If you have a strong relationship with your readers it really doesn't matter where that relationship takes place. You want that deep engagement, you want them to feel like they are getting something from you and that they're in control of their environment," said McAlister.

"Then they'll become more loyal, and with all the different ways in which news can be shared, they're more likely to share your stuff.

"It's part of a different way of thinking. Building the engagement relationships with the users is only going to be better for a media company."

As part of the changes, subscribers can now customise feeds from the site by keyword, subject area, or article type.

As an example, the feed http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/labour+environment/climatechange/rss could be used to view content that relates to the Labour party and climate change, McAlister explained in an introductory blog post on the changes.

Adverts in the site's RSS feeds will also be experimented with, though McAlister said the publisher will 'move slowly' on this and try out different formats.

The possibility of RSS becoming an advertising revenue stream for the Guardian would be more likely if other news sites adopt the same format, he added.

"If lots of people [media organisations] do figure out how to create a market out of this, that's a market we can jump into. Doing this alone, it's harder to go to an advertiser as you have to go through the whole process of education [about RSS feeds]. If lots of people are doing this and making money then we can all benefit."

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