In the last 20 hours, a tonne of folks have visited to read my piece on the Safari 5 Reader Hysteria. There’s been a fair number of comments and accompanying posts, so I figured it was worth adding some more points I didn’t address - my Tumblr Questions form seems to be serving as a handy feedback form, so if you’ve any thoughts throw them in there.
One reader mentioned the fact that Safari Reader’s pagination loads in the following pages content, thus effectively giving publishers the impressions. The only oversight here is that, of course, advertisers are possibly paying for impressions in the expectation that they’ll be meaningful ones, in front of actual readers - and I can see how that annoys advertising-driven types, though not sympathise with their cause.
In this day and age, I have to question just how many organisations can justify the artificial pagination in their pieces. Large online pieces pieces are rare in the mainstream online community (citation needed).
Then there’s folks who are actively looking (if only as an academic exercise) into ways of disabling folks ability to use Reader on their sites. Should people outside the developer community follow this lead, and start blocking Reader (a tool that encourages the consumption of their content) then people will start to vote with their feet and go elsewhere for their content.
Whilst Safari’s market share is relatively low, what’s the betting that Mozilla, Microsoft and Google are all watching curiously to see how this works? Google’s a particularly interesting case here: their interests are in both competing with Safari in Chrome, but also serving up ads online; it only takes Mozilla offering a similar feature in Firefox to cause consternation amongst online publishers and a rethinking of their online reading experiences.
To close, I’ve got two links. Firstly Lukas Mathis’s spot-on followup:
The one thing you can immediately influence is whether your users are able to easily read your articles. If they are not, then perhaps Safari Reader is not the problem, but merely a symptom of your actual problem.
If people don’t feel the need to use Safari Reader anymore, everybody wins. Don’t fight Safari Reader. Instead, make it obsolete.
And finally Tom Morris’ slightly more humorous (not-entirely-safe-for-work) retort:
All these wonderful things [comments, share buttons, and adverts] are gone now. Gone due to Steve Jobs and his insistence on good user experience. Bastard.
Posted on Thursday June 10th, 2010
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