I know most of you love to read my posts on BlogLovin, but I have had to truncate my post feeds from most RSS feed servers because my pageviews have been reduced to a fourth of what they used to be. I had an uneasy feeling about Bloglovin from the beginning. I thought, HEY! the more people who read my blog the better, but when someone else begins to profit from my work, I realized that I was being used. That is exactly what that service does to bloggers. It profits off their content.
For those of you that have been book bloggers for years, you know that you get promotions and things like the books you most desperately want by showing publishers your stats, which mostly come down to pageviews. My pageviews dropped in half when I signed up for THAT SITE. I tried to get my blog removed and they said “NO WAY”. Now, right there I thought something was fishy. Then I found out, my content was still there, copied word for word, and placed with THEIR advertising around it. Not my advertising, which I make a few cents here or there, but it is enough to run my blog.
I do not profit from my blog. I finally did a full on accounting and even with my advertising income, I still spent thousands last year with prizes and mailing for the giveaways. Why do I do this? It is my hobby, and I love interacting with readers and meeting people at book fests. I have made life long friend and meet with them in “real life”. I hated to do this, but even with moving to WordPress this past year, my feed still appears on THAT SITE. I know it is removing a convenience for the reader, but if my pageviews continue to drop, I won’t be able to get those promotions that everyone loves so much.
If you really love a blog and want to make sure it is always there, please click on link in your reader for the full post. It makes a world of difference to the blogger. And if you are really feeling generous, click on those banner ads so they can support themselves with hosting and mailing costs! I don’t know of any book blogger that actually makes a profit. We could probably buy all those “free” books with what we spend on time writing reviews and posts!
What I did to “truncate” my blog feed:
This just means that my full posts will no longer be available on feed services. You will only see a “snippet”.
I am not very tech savvy. I know a little bit about coding and googled the best solution to this.
I use feedburner and WordPress’ own service. If you use WordPress:
go to settings on your dashboard (that side column)
click on the READING tab
then click on this: For each article in a feed, show (it gives two choice FULL or SUMMARY) Pick summary
that way only a snippet of your post will show up on feeds, so people will have to visit to read the whole post. It does give enough information that people can decide if they want to read the whole post or not.
FOR FEEDBURNER:
Go to your feedburner account and click on the OPTIMIZE tab
then the BROWSERFRIENDLY tab
Click on FEED CONTENT
pick LIST ITEM TITLES ONLY
Check the ENABLE TAB and enter a message that lets the reader know to visit your site. click SAVE
The only service using feedburner is THAT SITE, so I have a note that the content is there without my permission.
There are other ways to subvert THAT SITE from stealing your pageviews, like creating a new feed source for your blog and redirecting it, but this was the quickest way for me to deal with it. I did send a letter to THAT SITE asking to remove my blogs, but it is still there. I may consider legal action for content theft and copyright infringement if they don’t remove my blogs.
Please, if you love my blog, don’t follow it on THAT SITE. You can subscribe to posts at the top right of my sidebar.
OFFBEAT YA has a well written post on this subject and has links, pictures and stuff I can’t figure out how to do.
Here is another great post about what THAT SITE is doing and that TUMBLR has blocked them – check out Homeless in Vancouver
Home Stories A to Z has another great HOW-TO post on what THAT SITE is actually doing and how to fix it.
Schatze will love you forever if you read my posts at the source.
ETA: UPDATE ON MY RANT:
Since I started truncating my feed, my views have doubled. I am also seeing click throughs from THAT SITE.
I will post again next week to see if the click rate stays true!
Great post, Mary! I very rarely even give THAT SITE any thought at all, nor do I read blog posts from it, even though I often click on the follow me options for it. I had no idea this was going on. I always follow the blogs I read via email. Also, you should know if you are worried about page views, you need to change you email settings to only show a partial snippet. I just read your entire post in my email, and the only reason I clicked over to your site is because I wanted to leave a comment. P.S. I love Schatzi!
This is why although I certainly follow blogs via Them, I did so because I thought it would help a blog,out to have another source of following. I think your average follower will be interested to learn this. And of course, anything for Schatze!
When THAT SITE was first getting big, it just didn’t seem right to me. So I didn’t join it. I didn’t get what the big deal was and I didn’t want to join yet another site, just to read my blogs, when I was getting along fine using (at the time Google Reader – RIP, now I use DIgg Reader – was using Feedly for a while but I heard of some issues with it, so not anymore). I am really glad I never signed up now after reading your post about it!
Great post, Mary, and thank for sharing it. Makes me more wary of sites like Bloglovin’ who seem to be offering something for free, but don’t.
I always read from your emails! Don’t care for bloglovin or the other one, even though I follow you on it.
I follow and read your blog by email and have never considered BlogLovin or any other way to follow. If bloggers would encourage readers to follow by email, perhaps some of these unfair practices could be avoided. Love Schatze!
I read your posts through eMail. While I am subscribed to many blogs on THAT SITE, I RARELY visit THAT SITE at all. I never really cared for THAT SITE as an RSS Reader, and I’d rather read via eMail or actual site or Facebook for blogs I like.
I miss Google Reader, which was my favorite RSS reader. I also used Feedly for awhile, until it started having login troubles all the time. Feel free to recommend me a good RSS reader to use nowadays.
Thanks for this post. I had no idea any of that was going on!
I definitely need to start reading Terms of Service more often… Bloglovin’s is TERRIFYING.
There are definitely ways to block Bloglovin’ from accessing your site. For me it’s a tough call though because I know I’d lose a lot of readers if I did that. I don’t use Bloglovin’ myself but I have a ton of followers there.
But I’m definitely considering either:
1. Blocking Bloglovin’ completely from my site.
2. Serving them excerpts instead of full posts.
It makes me sad because I like being able to give my readers full posts, but not if it means giving another site a license to use AND SELL my content.
Honestly I’m not even bothered by them “stealing my page views”. I’m bothered by giving them a license to sell and modify my work.
I do think I would lose some readers. As a reader of blogs myself, I get annoyed when I only see an excerpt in Feedly so I often just skip the post and don’t click over to view it unless the title REALLY pulls me in.
As for their TOS, do you have a link to it? I did find one super scary TOS but it turned out that was for their support centre and not for Bloglovin’ itself (which is confusing). But then the “TOS” they link to for the actual Bloglovin’ is only about their Privacy Policy and doesn’t include any information about collecting/displaying blog posts at all. But surely they at least need to claim a right to display your content, otherwise they couldn’t operate their site… So I guess I feel like I’m missing something.
Smart idea. Thanks.
Thank you. I have made the necessary adjustments to my feed.