Why Readers Unsubscribe From Blog RSS Feeds

Finally – someone did a little Q&A research on this topic! Darren over at Problogger asked his readers, “What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?” and after over 100 responses, tallied everything up in a post titled, “34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog“.

The top three reasons?

1. Too many posts. (This is one of my personal pet peeves as well.) When you’re posting more than once or twice a day, you’re overloading your readers. I’ve unsubscribed from several sites’ feeds for this very reason. The whole point in using RSS feeds is so that you can get everything you want to get in one place, to cut time. When half my reader’s full of only one site – I get a little annoyed and wind up deleting them all without reading them. Eventually, I just unsub.
2. Infrequent posting. Wow, okay… so you either post too much or not enough and you’re going to lose readers. I tend to disagree with this one a little, only because if a user’s not posting, then my feed reader isn’t getting clogged by them, so why not keep on for a while? No, I’m not saying for six months or more… but there is real life beyond the computer screen (gasp!) and sometimes people just have things that grasp higher priority levels than others. It doesn’t mean they won’t come back, and it doesn’t mean they’re a “bad blogger”.

   My number two reason is a little different… I just can’t stand it when a “business blog” gets too personal, or a personal blog gets too whiny, boring, or repetitive. When a blog changes focus, be it positive or negative, it changes the whole reason I subscribed in the first place.

3. Partial excerpts feeds. Ah yes! The debate rolls on! But it’s quite clear that offering full feeds is likely to keep readers moreso than only partials, forcing the reader to click through to your site to get the whole story. (One person mentioned that they had to click through an ad to get to the story!) The bottom line is that people use feed readers to get through their news and stories all in one place. By forcing them to come to your site, you’re defeating the purpose of offering feeds at all.

   I totally agree with this one. Think about why you’re trying to get them to come to your site. Is it so that maybe they’ll click on your ads? Or is it because you want them to see what else you have to offer? Either way, with the advent of “feedvertising”, you can send ads for yourself or any other site you want with your feeds. Check out Text Link Ads, where you can use feedvertising to include your own ads, affiliate links, or allow others to buy links in your feeds.

So there you have it. If you’re doing any of these things – knock it off! Well, at least if you want to keep your feed readership (and possibly those people who have “bookmarked” your site).