A funny (peculiar, not haha) thing about major media site RSS feeds is that not only are the feeds often little more than a plain text (and so kinda boring) sentence, but also that their RSS feeds tend to include thumbnail images as enclosures. Enclosures are the part of a feed typically used for podcast media files, and the problem with stashing an image as an enclosure is that most people won’t see it, since the picture isn’t part of the main content. As a result, the feed and downstream feed usage (e.g. email subscriptions) are much less engaging for us carbon based life forms, and so the feed produces less traffic back to the publisher’s site than it otherwise might.
We like engagement. You like engagement! Everyone likes more of the right kind of traffic.
So we have fixed this for FeedBlitz publishers.
From now on, if FeedBlitz finds an image enclosure in a feed and there are no other images in the main content, it will bring that image up into the main content (just above the social sharing icons) to make it visible to people. This will make the feed much more engaging, and encourage click throughs. FeedBlitz will leave the enclosure as it found it, however, in case there are downstream apps that expect and need that image file to be in the feed as an enclosure element. Or, in other words, the change is backwards compatible with the way the feed XML was formatted before.
Author: Phil Hollows
Courtesy: www.feedblitz.com
