Snell-o-vision

Jason Snell looks at Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 event and its shots at Google and Adobe, and what it all means.

PItcher

So Gruber noted my previous piece responding to Merlin Mann.

I’ve had a few people ask if I was going to “respond to Gruber,” and I told them I wasn’t, because I don’t necessarily disagree with anything John wrote.

All I would say — and Gruber notes this himself in the piece — is that the economics of a one-man blog are vastly different from the economics of a publishing company with multiple products, a staff of editors, an ad sales force, and a development team.

Now, we can argue about whether the future of the media is guys like John, or organizations like mine. (My thought: there’s probably room for both, though organizations like mine are not going to be common.) But what is safe to say is that what works for John Gruber and Merlin Mann might not work for most other people. This isn’t to say that they’re not right about their own situation — I am aware of how much Gruber makes on RSS sponsorships, and it’s a fantastic model. There’s a reason my counterpart at PC World, Harry McCracken, quit his job and started his own blog instead. (I have two small children and am my family’s sole source of income, which explains why I probably won’t be quitting to start my own Apple blog any time soon.)

But what works for that kind of site doesn’t necessarily work for our kind. A full income for one man is a drop in the bucket for a company with dozens of employees and an owner that expects a solid profit margin every year. (I also doubt that Gruber’s RSS sponsors hold him to the return-on-investment terms that our advertisers hold us to. Which is great for him, because he’s got enough prestige that it’s probably not required yet. Nobody wants to see John Gruber make a healthy living doing what he does more than me.)

So I guess this is my response to Gruber, but it’s not really a response. I don’t think he’s right, or I’m right. I think we’ve got different perspectives because our businesses are different. I agree with him completely about how important an audience is. Without an audience, you’re nothing. But of course, I can have all the audience in the world, but if I can’t convert that somehow into cash, I can’t feed my family. How that conversion happens is the question. And I don’t think there’s a single right answer.

merlin:

And, I’ll look forward to seeing similar CMS bugs fixed by Macworld, The New York Times, and all the other excellent sites that fell out of my reader when their full-content feeds disappeared.

Full content in RSS is awesome. Free content in general is awesome. There’s just one trick. In the end, writers need to be paid.

As an editorial guy, I’ve advocated for freer approaches to RSS for a long time. But I’m also someone who works for a large-ish publishing company who is seeing a years-long shift toward online revenue from print revenue.

RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS, sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the return as ads on web pages. The question is, if you publish all your content in RSS, does the resulting drop in traffic get offset by the fringe benefits? In the mind of some — presumably including Merlin Mann and John Gruber — you may lose a small percentage of tech-savvy people, but those people tend to be the ones who pass links around to friends and on their blogs and on Twitter, and a lot of those people will come to your web site from there, so in the end it’s a net benefit. Plus, more people will care about you and your brand and that’s a good thing.

I agree, that’s good. I wish someone could cite some studies that prove that giving away your full-text RSS doesn’t hurt traffic, but helps it. As for general good feelings toward the brand, it reminds me of people who block all the ads on our web site and then complain about what we write. We can’t keep our company in business based entirely on the goodwill of people who don’t give us money or see ads that make us money. Goodwill is fantastic, and connection between publishers and audiences is vital to the survival of those publishers. But no publisher can stay in business based on connections alone. Without money, the business can’t survive. So where does the money come from? It has to come from somewhere.

Nobody would like us to publish full-content RSS feeds more than I would. But I can’t figure out the math that allows us to do that without shooting ourselves in the head.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I understand what Merlin is saying on an idealistic level. Is full-text RSS the “right thing to do” on the Web in terms of usability and friendliness and the like? Absolutely. But if everyone started reading full-text RSS and stopped going to our web site, we’d go out of business. So I’ve got some concerns there.

(Side note: A lot of people view me as “Mr. Macworld,” but my job title is Editorial Director, not President, and I have no authority over the ad-sales or business departments of my company, though occasionally I have the power of persuasion on my side. I am one part of a large company, but I’m not the Big Boss.)

Back to the beginning: Full-content RSS feeds are awesome. Would you pay to get them, and to turn off all the ads on our web site, like Ars Technica? Maybe something like that is the solution to all this. I don’t know. All I know is, right now when I talk to the people on my company’s business side, and I mention putting all our content into RSS feeds, they look at me like I’m crazy.

We did a Mac Pundit Showdown at Expo, and tried to capture the audio, but it was an utter failure. Not the presentation, just the audio recording. I’ve made a recording from two samples that is listenable, but is really only of bootleg quality.

So if you want to listen, you can - but don’t complain that it sounds awful, because it does. Though after the first 45 seconds you can actually understand what’s going on. The first 45 seconds? Not so much. Sorry ‘bout that.

Guests: Paul Kafasis, John Moltz, Dan Moren, and Peter Cohen.

I’m not going to autopost my Twitter stuff to Tumblr anymore. Feel free to follow me at twitter.com/jsnell instead.

.@will_blake Opening a Sierra Nevada Porter to go with my homemade chili.

Nice to actually be watching a major Olympic event live, for once. (USA-Canada hockey.)

I should say, not on an HD channel carried by my provider. :-(

Do you believe in hockey upsets by professional athletes? YES!!!!!!!!!!

This is a really entertaining hockey game. Wish it was in HD.

Did I just buy a Curling game for my iPhone? Yes. Yes I did.

And now to bed.

Limo ride with ¥PhilMichaels to 10th anniversary dinner with Pat McGovern. http://twitpic.com/1486ps

Who has two thumbs, two copies of BIAS SoundSoap, and an inability to use either of them due to ridiculous software authorization? This guy!