The Power of ChoiceOct16

Brooks Jordan 0 comments

Who would have thought that a venture capitalist would be so entertaining to read . . . entertaining, insightful (and understandable), and maybe a bit prophetic? Well, Fred Wilson is all of these things.

I read feeds from around the Web religiously and though others are close seconds and thirds, Fred's feed is the one I get the most out of. He and his partner, Brad Burnham, at Union Square Ventures are focused on "lighweight web services built on top of commodity/open source infrastructure," which others of us might call Web 2.0.

Let's see, today he has 12,514 subscribers to his feed (visible in his left sidebar toward the bottom), and that's only a portion of his overall readership, although a nice portion.

Fred has made the point in a previous post, if I remember correctly, that your feed audience - the people that subscribe to that little RSS icon on your website by placing it in their feed reader - is not the same as the people coming to your website. This is a different crowd that consumes the Web in their own way. One way of expressing this difference is that instead of surfing here and there they sail in particular directions, to specific destinations. In terms of information that means they want to know about certain things and to go a little deeper into them. That's why the use a feed reader to get their information - because it aggregates it in one place and they can watch it evolve over time.

So, the point is, if you're trying to connect with people who have positive attention spans, your feed audience is generally that audience.

Now, Fred gives us a data point on this attentive audience that is really quite enlightening. Here's what he says in a recent post:

Less than half of all my impressions last month happened on my site. I delivered about 300,000 ad impressions in September. Over 60% of them were in my feed. That's right, sixty percent.

Isn't that interesting? It really is quite interesting. Because it strongly suggests that people who choose to subscribe to a feed are at least as proactive and probably more so than the people who visit your Web page. I have a feeling that two years from now that's going to seem like common knowledge. But right now, Fred's data point feels like a breakthrough in demonstrating that there might be a better, more effective way to share information than through Web (and blog) pages.

It's quite logical actually. I don't think it's too far fetched to say that feeds are an evolution in how information and knowledge on the Web are consumed not simply another way they are consumed: i.e., a Web page is how you find information but a Web feed is how you choose information. Naturally, you are going to trust the ads (and other forms of marketing) more in something you have chosen.