What’s my 2020 blog doing on the Kindle?
By Joe Wikert
A reader of my Publishing 2020 blog recently e-mailed me this link to a new product for the Kindle. This new product is the feed of the 2020 blog, which Amazon is now selling for 99 cents per month.
I was never asked to participate in the program, so I’m assuming it’s the result of a blogging syndication deal I signed a couple of years ago. Thanks to the world of syndication you never know where your content might appear, and you really don’t have much say in the matter. I’m not complaining, and I certainly don’t anticipate many (any?!) subscriptions to materialize via this service; even if they do, I’m getting a slice of a slice of a pretty tiny (99-cent) slice, so it’s not changing my world.
The bigger question I have is "why?" Why is Amazon bothering with adding these blog feeds? The rankings I’m seeing for most of them is pretty low. More importantly, I’ve found that once Kindle owners discover free blog feed services like Kindlefeeder, they feel the paid feeds are a rip-off.
think Amazon would be better off redirecting their efforts to increase the number of available paid blog feeds. For example, they still only have 18 magazines for sale on the Kindle, and loads of technology and business titles are noticeably absent from the list. Every minute spent adding another blog to the service is time that should have been spent building up the magazine base, IMHO.
Moderator: Some of the 2020 posts, through arrangements with Joe, also appear in the TeleBlog. - D.R.
November 16th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
“I’ve found that once Kindle owners discover free blog feed services like Kindlefeeder, they feel the paid feeds are a rip-off.”
Doesn’t Kindlefeeder send blog feeds to your Kindle via your Kindle email address? Didn’t that use to cost 10 cents each time? If so, wouldn’t subscribing to a feed via Kindlefeeder end up costing more than the nominal fee Amazon charges for most blogs?
Hardly seems that Amazon is a rip-off.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Kindlefeeder aggregates a bunch of feeds into one delivery, so you could very well end up saving money. You can set it up so you get 30 feeds in one delivery per day.