Charles on… anything that comes along

Interesting read over at problogger on 34 reasons why readers unsubscribe from your blog:

Thanks to everyone who has added their thoughts on why they unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed. There have been 109 comments left on that post so far and some interesting recurring themes have emerged.

…Obviously with 103 opinions (and most people giving multiple reasons all in their own words) I’ve had to make some judgement calls in classifying comments left. Some of the categories below have overlap but I think you’ll get a pretty good picture of what motivates people to unsubscribe from RSS feeds.

34 Reasons Why People Unsubscribe from RSS feeds:

1. Too many posts (the post levels are too overwhelming) - 37
2. Infrequent Posting (or the blog is effectively dead) - 29
3. Partial Excerpts Feeds - 25
4. Blog Changes Focus (too much off topic posting) - 23
5. Too many posts that I see elsewhere (Redundant, Repeated or Recycled News) - 19
6. Uninteresting Content - 16
7. Irrelevant Content - 13
8. The Blogger’s Ego - Too much self promotion - 11
9. Low Quality Content - 11
10. Too many posts that are too long - 10
11. Negative blogging - 7
12. Feed Errors - Especially when a Feed Reloads the latest 10-20 posts every time - 7
13. Offensive Content/Personal attacks/Discrimination - 6
14. ‘infomercials’ (too much selling) - 6
15. Blog Titles that Don’t Tell what the post is about - 5
16. No or Poor Formatting in posts - 5
17. My own interests as a reader change - 5
18. No Longer Useful or Valuable - 4
19. Too many links in the text and not enough content - 4
20. Advertising - 3
21. Inconsistent writing (style and focus) - 2
22. Too Many Grammatical Errors - 2

…and so on. It gets a bit trivial after that.

I find it interesting that “partial RSS feeds” is the No.3 (after the rather difficult to reconcile “too much” and “too little”). It’s certainly what frustrates me the most; there aren’t that many feeds that I stay subscribed to which only give a partial content. (I still don’t get why Martin Stabe doesn’t do a full feed, for instance. Are there adverts I’ve not noticed, Martin? And none of the RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0 or Atom 0.3 feeds offers a full feed.)

So anyway, I shall endeavour not to post too much, nor too little. And the feed remains full.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Ooh that Jemima Kiss, don't annoy her (17 March 2005; score: 46.31%)
• When you stop reading news.. nothing happens (26 July 2006; score: 37.42%)
• In the Guardian: stop this online sharing now! (25 January 2008; score: 29.65%)