Remember the RSS contest between Jown Chow and Shoemoney I was talking about? Well… The scales kinda tipped:
Shoe is now obviously in the lead, and he hasn’t even started his RSS Contest yet… He did show an interesting technique in the week though, you got a lightbox (I think) popup if you were new to the site, asking you to subscribe:
You see the spike in the stats above? That happened soon after he put this up, which makes me think, that this is something I should be doing too… Combined with my new From RSS WordPress plugin, I could make this show up for everybody who isn’t coming from a feedreader, drop a cookie once they’ve seen it once and they shouldn’t have to see it again. I’m very curious as to what his contest will entail…
This contest sure is worth watching, if only to see which new techniques these guys develop!
The pop-up is obviously going to drive new visitors to subscribe but I think you have to be careful about using it too much. You also need to make sure it’s implemented correctly – I clicked a link from Google Reader to go visit a Shoemoney post recently and was presented with the box – which annoys me as someone who already subscribes. Nice to see Shoe winning the race though!
I think the only safe way to show a popup is for visitors from search engines. People from social networks would hate it.
The Shoemoney way win this would be dos attacking the John Chow feed so it would get availability problems.
New subscribers cannot detect the feed and some RSS readers would start delivering unavailability messages and then existing subscriber would unsubscribe from the feed.
Anyone willing to help Shoe on this? ;)
@Tom and Patrick: we agree. Tom: I sent Shoe my new plugin so he could use that, he didn’t do that yet though ;)
@Peter: John uses feedburner, that would mean attacking the availability of FeedBurner, since you don’t know which URL he’s pointing FeedBurner to. Attacking FeedBurner’s availability seems like quite undoable to me…
Your right Joost, next time I’ll look into it first. But keep this method for the toolbox!
Seriously Joost, don’t do it. It’s sooo annoying. Searchenginecollege does it (well, something similar) and it’s why I don’t visit their site from my feedreader.
And do people still care about usability and accessibility?
If I do it, I’ll do it for people coming from search engines only and selected referrers only.
But why would someone coming from search engines for the FIRST time want to subscribe if they have not read your content yet?
True.