Over the weekend we made the decision to switch the RSS feed of TasteTO posts from a full version to a truncated style that requires people reading the site through an RSS reader to click through to the site to see the whole article. A number of you have emailed us today to express your displeasure at this decision, and request that we switch it back.
Unfortunately, we are unable to do that at this time. Here's why...
As much as we love running TasteTO, it is, at its essence, a business. And as a business, it needs to make money to survive. We have bills to pay for expenses associated with running the site, we also have writers who deserve to be paid for their time and effort, and eventually, Greg and I would like to pay ourselves, since the site is a full time job for me and a part time one for him.
Over the past two years, advertising has been hard to come by (as can be demonstrated by the small number of ads in our sidebars). We are still too small of a "media empire" to be on the radar of larger advertisers, and the small independent businesses we'd prefer to feature as advertisers on our site just don't have the budgets to spend on advertising, especially now when times in the food and restaurant industries are getting tough.
To make up for this shortfall, we've settled for passive advertising systems such as Google Adsense, and will be adding another passive advertising system within the next few weeks. These systems pay us based on the number of site impressions they register - if readers don't actually come to the site, and instead read the full articles through an RSS reader, they don't get counted as hits to TasteTO, which means we make less money, and in turn cannot pay our bills, or our writers, or promote the site further. (It also decreases the total hit numbers that we use in trying to persuade paid advertisers to run ads with us.)
While we know clicking through to read the full article on the site is an inconvenience for many of you, we ask that you think of it as one small thing you can do to help keep TasteTO running. We don't charge to access content, we don't even have one of those tacky "tip jar" things on our site; all we're asking is that in exchange for the entertainment and information our readers receive on a daily basis, they click the link and hit the site and be counted as a visitor so that the advertising systems we use can translate that visit into dollars that will keep the site running. Unless we win the lottery or one of you has a fat chequebook and is feeling philanthropic, the alternative to the truncated RSS feed is potentially shutting the site down. We don't want that, and we would hope that none of our readers want that either.
Note that we are looking into various options that would place ads in the RSS feed of TasteTO posts. If this is a financially viable alternative that would offer a comparable rate of compensation to the systems we are using that require readers to hit the site and be counted, we will definitely put these in place and return to the full RSS feed. But in the meantime, while we apologize for the inconvenience, we need the revenue generated by the click-throughs the truncated feed provides. If you enjoy the site and don't want to see it disappear, we hope that you'll make the effort and click the link and read the articles directly from the TasteTO site.
