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Google Algorithm Change Whacks Naked Capitalism | naked capitalism.

Yves’ article and observations here are interesting. They reflect the effect of changes in how we (or people like me) read many sites. I use Feedly. It aggregates RSS feeds and I can read these on any number of devices. As a consequence, I don’t actually visit sites like naked capitalism or any of the others I am subscribed to very often. And I didn’t really think about the consequences of my ceasing to visit them.

But advertisers do track these things and so do site owners, who deal with advertisers and set prices. The effects then of subscriptions is unclear, as it seems to deprecate the actual value of the site. A strategy that NC is now contemplating is truncating what is actually delivered via RSS, forcing the reader who wants more to go to the site. I can live with that.

I also suspect that in the next few years if not sooner more subscriptions will bloom. Ads are finicky things; subscriptions, which pretty much date back to the 19th century (and is how books were initially sold, at least in the US), are less so. So, in this model, I’d not only pay for my Feedly account, which provides useful tools for content aggregation, search, etc., but also to the various sites I subscribe to. However, the fee would have to be small and I would guess also set so that it could be itself packaged with other, related sites and services.