Penny Arcade RSS Discussion

Robert Khoo

Greetings everyone - so something happened to our main RSS feed about 2 months ago, and we're trying to get to the bottom of it! In short, we had several hundred thousand subscribers to it, and poof, magically we went down to less than a hundred thousand within a two day period.

I'd really love your thoughts on why you think it may have happened, if we're doing something differently with it, or what we can do to fix it / make it better. Please post in here or email beepboop@penny-arcade.com, and we'll all read the feedback etc. Thanks everyone.

T-Dawg

I use google reader to follow the updates via RSS. For quite a while (weeks?) after the site redesign, I know I was getting a lot of duplicates every time you guys made an update. IIRC, whenever you'd make a new comic/post, I'd get an update via RSS of every post you'd done since the site update.

Not sure if that helps, but perhaps the spammy nature drove people off? Just a thought. Oh, everything's working fine now, for what it's worth.

Robert Khoo

Yeah, we saw that issue, and tried to fix as quick as we could - sorry about that. But the graph I see doesn't quite line up with that. It's just a cliff... massive. cliff!

But it sounds like you're currently a subscriber. Is there anything we can do to improve it?

ASimPerson

I use Thunderbird as my main RSS reader.

Didn't the URL change with the site redesign? When I check my subscriptions, I see I have two URLs: http://www.penny-arcade.com/RSS.xml and http://penny-arcade.com/feed. That would be a pretty good reason why you lost subscribers. Also, I got the duplicate posts thing as well, but it's better now.

phildini

I know that I've had no trouble with the PA RSS through Google Reader. Is it possible that most of the users were through some third-party source that suddenly stopped carrying PA? Can you see where (if any) the redirects to the feed are coming from?

LoneGunman

Might be the URL change. I rebuilt my computer a few months back so I lost the feed link in the shuffle. I checked the XML and tested adding the feed to IE and a couple versions of Firefox. Seems fine.

cyphr

Hey Khoo, I subscribe to the feed exclusively to see if there have been new News Posts to the site. I much prefer reading the content in a browser on an actual monitor, so RSS is basically an alert system for me. With that in mind, here are my thoughts:

1) Dropping hundreds of thousands of subscribers in 2 days is not a userbase problem, it's a technical problem. That sort of migration almost never happens in the first place, and when it does, it's over the course of a month or two. An exception could be made for when a company really screws up, like when Blizzard introduced RealID, but PA has never done anything like that as far as I know. Check to see if there was an iOS update or something that inadvertently wiped RSS subs.

2) As far as ideas for improvements to the feed (which it seems is what you're looking for), I only have one, and I'm still conflicted about whether it would be a good business decision. I would like to have the jpgs of the comics in my feed reader. I've always been annoyed with RSS posts that are simply a subject with no content, but I recognize that PA relies heavily on advertising to keep the business running. Your call.


Wait, hold on, just thought of a third item. I'd say definitely go ahead and publish all of the side projects on the feed. Currently it only updates with comics and news posts as far as I can tell. Getting notifications when a new PATV episode is published or when an item is new/back in stock would be great. Currently the PA feed is probably the most sparse of all that I subscribe to, so it wouldn't be an annoyance.

So, that's my two cents. I'd be interested in hearing more if you get more info about the mass "exodus" of subscribers.

T-Dawg

Robert Khoo wrote:

Yeah, we saw that issue, and tried to fix as quick as we could - sorry about that. But the graph I see doesn't quite line up with that. It's just a cliff... massive. cliff!

But it sounds like you're currently a subscriber. Is there anything we can do to improve it?

Was about to say "not that I can think of" but how about adding when there are new PATV episodes? You guys don't always send out a tweet or make a newspost. Just a thought.

cyphr

LoneGunman wrote:

Might be the URL change. I rebuilt my computer a few months back so I lost the feed link in the shuffle. I checked the XML and tested adding the feed to IE and a couple versions of Firefox. Seems fine.

If there was actually a URL change, this is absolutely the source of the problem. Set up your redirects!

Robert Khoo

This is excellent feedback guys - and it sounds like we're slowly uncovering what happened to the lost subscribers. the rss.xml vs. /feed/ issue seems to be the culprit, and one is currently dormant. We'll figure stuff out over the next day or two.

For the improvements - we'd like to be able to provide some content to the feed on the comic, but yeah - unfortunately if we put the full comic in the feed, we'd need to probably put ads in the RSS feed too, which isn't something I'm willing to do. Maybe if we put in the first panel or a snippet like on the homepage?

PATV - we have separate feeds for those, but i'll see what we can do about integrating that content into the main feed.

LoneGunman

Snippet sounds good. First panel's probably the best idea (with a snippet for single panel comics). Sort of a teaser that you can actually make out (the ones on the home page are nice and salesy but you can't see anything serious so they're just nice looking).

And I second the motion of either adding entries for other content streams (PATV, Trenches, etc.) or how about creating a new feed that's an all-inclusive for peeps who are just straight up junkies? Then you can leave separate feeds for the various content streams...

cyphr

I think snippet is a good idea, but instead of the first panel, I'd see if you can get Jerry to write a "synopsis" of the comic. It doesn't need to hint to the punchline at all, just a tease. For example, for Wednesday's comic, it could be something like

"In which Tycho discovers that the government offers intimate gropings for less than the price of a hooker."

Except, you know, funny and in Tycho's style. Yeah.

EDIT: I think you could get Jerry to do this for the price of a lunch at Red Robin. You know this to be true, Robert.

Robert Khoo

Hah - a summary of a 3-panel strip? COME ON. Pretty soon you'll want a summary of the summary.

cyphr

Robert Khoo wrote:

Hah - a summary of a 3-panel strip? COME ON. Pretty soon you'll want a summary of the summary.

If you could get it down to a single adjective, I'd really appreciate it. I'm a busy man, Khoo.

a_midgett

Awhile back, I found a service that creates full RSS feeds out of sites that only put in summaries in theirs (or, in the case of PA, truncated blog entries.) I switched my PA feed to that one, however I didn't drop the original. It worked for the blog entries -- I can now read Jerry's full posts in Google Reader -- but I still have to click through for the comics.

I would welcome advertisements in the RSS feed(s) if it meant I could get the same content without visiting the site. Granted, mine is a special case, but I've been traveling the world for the a year and there are countries that seem to have whole ISPs running on a 300 baud modem. I've even come across places that have blocked penny-arcade.com.

cyphr

Yeah, I know I'd be fine with ads on the feed, and I think the vast majority of subscribers would as well. The problem is that, in my opinion, pretty much no one would actually click (press?) on those ads. So it really comes down to a business decision on whether the ad impressions across the RSS userbase are more or less profitable than conversions from the feed to impressions + clicks on the main site.

ANALYTICS, HOOOOOOOOOO!

Waspanater

I know that when the site redesign hit my RSS feed stopped working, no new posts come through (it took me more than a week to realise). I had to re-add the feed. I use Google Reader/Feedly.

Other than that, and the duplicate issue whcih seems to be fixed now, the feeds been working fine.

Aldo

I currently keep tabs on the main PA feed for news and comic updates and separate feeds for Extra Credits, CheckPoint and the PA Series. I did have to resubscribe to the feed once as it didn't update properly any more (apparently you changed the URL at some point in time) Do you see your number of subscribers slowly rise again? That could mean people slowly discover that their feed doesn't work and they have to resubscribe.

I mean, just guessing here.

Destrin

The feed was very broken for a period after the site redesign, for something like 2 weeks or so I think? Also, I seem to recall that whichever feed I was subscribed to just flat out stopped updating and I had to repoint my feed (I don't remember the URL, but it's NOT http://penny-arcade.com/feed because that's what I'm currently pointing at).

I'd imagine those two things cost you readers that couldn't be bothered to go back and find the working ones

Athenor

I know my RSS Feed is on my Firefox browser and I've moved mostly to Chrome, but I'm just a drop in the pool. I also miss my live bookmarks. But yeah, my feed is broken and still pointing at the old system.

On the "putting PATV in the stream" thing, how hard would it be to set it up like Channel Awesome, where you have 1 feed for every content channel, and then one master-feed for everything? Or would that dilute things?

Perrsun

I use Google Reader and I, too, had the "Days of silence, then every time there was 1 update I had 18 new posts to look at" problem after the site updated. Just like the other people that mentioned it, it's better now.

I'll also echo that I wouldn't mind seeing updates to PATV come through the RSS feed.

Zilla360

It's probably because it was broken for a while, I know I had trouble finding the new URL.

mcdermott

Robert Khoo wrote:

Hah - a summary of a 3-panel strip? COME ON. Pretty soon you'll want a summary of the summary.

tl;dr

agilemania

So there was a forum thread about the RSS issues a while ago that might provide some historical context: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/146892/fixed-mainsite-rss-has-a-new-url-see-op

Summary:
With the new site, both old URLs (http://www.penny-arcade.com/rss.xml and http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/pa-mainsite) stopped working. This occurred on August 15, almost exactly two months ago. A new feed was set up at a new URL a few days later (http://penny-arcade.com/feed). Even after the new feed was set up, there were issues for weeks regarding duplicate stories and bad links. I'm willing to bet it was the combination of these two issues.

Regarding PATV:
@Kethenn recently added RSS feeds for each show plus an aggregate feed for all of PATV. Many people may not have noticed them. To see the links, go to http://penny-arcade.com/patv and click the "Feeds" button near the top. I disagree with the idea that those shows should be merged into the main feed. How hard can it be to subscribe to two feeds?

Dead Cow

I know for me I use Reeder on the Mac linked to my Google Reader account. About the same time that I was getting duplicate entries every time the feed was updated I also had the feed listed twice. I though, and perhaps it still is, at the time it was an issue with Reeder or Google Reader. I unsubscribed to one of the feed and kept the other.

I, for most sites, use Readability but I find the main Penny Arcade site to be more ascetically pleasing. I would love a mobile version of the site as I often read it on my phone. Although the new site is much better on mobile than the old one.

rabidmuskrat

Robert Khoo wrote:

This is excellent feedback guys - and it sounds like we're slowly uncovering what happened to the lost subscribers. the rss.xml vs. /feed/ issue seems to be the culprit, and one is currently dormant. We'll figure stuff out over the next day or two.

For the improvements - we'd like to be able to provide some content to the feed on the comic, but yeah - unfortunately if we put the full comic in the feed, we'd need to probably put ads in the RSS feed too, which isn't something I'm willing to do. Maybe if we put in the first panel or a snippet like on the homepage?

PATV - we have separate feeds for those, but i'll see what we can do about integrating that content into the main feed.

I would welcome ads in the RSS feed with open arms if it meant the entire comic showed up in there without needing to click a link.

Mutak

I'd love a feed that included the full comic and any related news posts bundled together, even if it were delayed and even if it also included ads. Save me some clicking please.

Qorzm

In terms of delivering new content to your fans as it comes out, I just wanted to say that I am really loving the regular Facebook updates -- It's essentially my RSS reader

Shwa

I've been wondering for a while if people are getting this same issue: every RSS link to a new Extra Credits episode is early, meaning the episode isn't up when the RSS says it is, sometimes by up to 4-5 hours...
Infrequently this happens with the comic too, and I have no idea about other PATV shows, but the Extra Credits is pretty reliably not going to be available to me until several hours after the feed update. Just curious as to what's up with that..

MKR

Have an ad-free RSS feed with excerpts and a full feed with sponsor posts/inline ads.

Banzai5150

I do not want more shows added to the main feed. If you want other shows add their feeds, leave the main feed do what it does.

RandomEngy

Banzai5150 wrote:

I do not want more shows added to the main feed. If you want other shows add their feeds, leave the main feed do what it does.

Agreed. Have a new "everything" feed with all the PATV shows if you want but it seems unlikely to me that all the PA RSS subscribers would appreciate getting notifications they didn't sign up for.