Case Study: Winning With RSS Feeds

2003 was a pivotal year for RSS. Dave Winer’s RSS 2.0 specification, published the previous year through UserLand Software, moved under the stewardship of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center and was released under a Creative Commons license, giving publishers confidence the format wouldn’t be locked behind one company’s terms. At the same time, email marketing was running into real trouble: spam volume had exploded, inbox filters were getting aggressive and in December Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act to regulate commercial email. For businesses that relied on email newsletters to reach customers, RSS looked like a genuine alternative.

Here’s an illustrative scenario based on the kind of adoption that played out at small and mid-sized publishers and retailers that year.

The situation

Picture a mid-sized outdoor gear catalog business with an email newsletter list of about 40,000 subscribers. Open rates had been sliding for over a year, deliverability was inconsistent as ISPs tightened spam filtering and the marketing team suspected a meaningful chunk of their list was being filtered before it ever reached an inbox. They needed a second channel that didn’t depend on getting past a spam filter.

The decision

Rather than replacing the newsletter outright, the team added a full-content RSS feed alongside it: new product write-ups, gear reviews and seasonal buying guides, published as a feed anyone could subscribe to through an aggregator like NewsIsFree or a desktop reader like Radio UserLand. The team made a deliberate choice that turned out to matter: the feed carried complete article text, not just a headline and a teaser link. Truncated feeds were common at the time, largely to protect ad impressions on the site itself, but the team judged that a useful feed would earn more loyalty than a few extra pageviews.

They validated the feed against Mark Pilgrim’s Feed Validator before launch, a step that caught a malformed date field they wouldn’t have otherwise noticed. A broken feed simply fails silently in most readers, so this was not optional.

What happened

Subscriber growth for the feed was slow at first: RSS readers were still a niche tool used mostly by early adopters and other publishers. But the subscribers it did attract behaved differently than newsletter subscribers. Feed readers who saw a new gear review showed up on the site within the day at a noticeably higher rate than email subscribers, who might not open a message for days if at all. The team also noticed something they hadn’t planned for: other niche outdoor and camping sites started linking to individual reviews they’d picked up from the feed, since the full content made it easy to reference and quote accurately.

By the end of the year, the feed’s subscriber count was still a fraction of the email list. But it was one of the few channels where engagement was trending up instead of down, and it cost almost nothing to maintain once the initial setup was done.

Why it worked

Three decisions mattered more than the technology itself. First, full content instead of truncated teasers meant the feed was useful on its own, not just a lure back to the site. Second, validating the feed caught an error that would have quietly broken the whole effort. Third, the team treated RSS as a genuine second channel worth investing real content into, not an afterthought bolted onto whatever they were already publishing for email.

None of this replaced email as the primary channel in 2003. What it did was give the business a foothold in a format that wasn’t subject to the same deliverability problems, at a moment when those problems were only getting worse.