Pete Clifton is the editor of the BBC News website, and he’s promising a “revolution” in RSS after the UK election.
We’ve been a bit cautious about [RSS] up to now. “Personal use only” has been the mantra, but after a lengthy discussion with the BBC’s editorial policy department we are about to free things up.
So in May we’ll be happy for outside websites to dip in and take our headlines. We’re also adding new feeds, like one with the most recently published stories, and still to come will be an RSS search telling you when reports have been published about particular topics you are interested in.
Not to be glib, but the various terms of service on RSS usage, including the one I’ve written, are (perhaps) spitting into the wind. I don’t know of anyone who has attempted to limit other websites, commercial or otherwise, from using RSS feeds, at least in the headline/brief summary model. If you put something in an RSS feed, you’re opening the door (and the can of worms). Also, there is no way for the Terms of Service (TOS) to travel easily with the feed itself, so most people can honestly say they’ve never seen or heard of a feed’s TOS.
So, while I applaud the BBC, and I think they are doing the right thing, it’s also an acknowledgement of the world as it is today — which should not be underestimated, I guess, from a big organization.
Interesting statistic from Clifton:
In March, we registered 16.5 million click-throughs to reports from RSS feeds, and our target is 10% of our traffic driven by RSS by the end of this year.
As a semi-governmental agency, the BBC releases its stats publicly. Here’s the relevant details from the 2004 report. Scroll down to Tables 10 and 11 in this large text file. News and Sports add up to 535 million pageviews/month. (Would love to see News and Sport broken out separately!) 8.9 million unique users/month. 60 pages/user/month in 2004… not bad. I’ll assume that BBC traffic is going up, let’s say to 700 million pageviews/month (bigger? much bigger?), so that’s 70 million clickthroughs from RSS in December 2005. Wonder what Yahoo or the NYTimes will do during the same month? In any event, big numbers, worth the focus and attention at the top level.