Comments on: Daily Downloads: CyberDuck, Firefox, AIM, and More

By: Change

Change — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:40:17 +0000

We’ve pondered not doing the Daily Downloads, but they have actually become a strong aspect of our site. Everyday it’s one of our most visited articles, and people frequently email me with compliments on the icon concoctions that I come up with. So I think it will be sticking around for the time being.

Okay, good argument It’s true that those concoctions are great, almost worth visiting this article just for that Thanks for the reply & clarifications!

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:41:11 +0000

We don't have any intentions of "cutting" the Daily Downloads feed quite yet. The only reason I did it today was because of the sheer length, but that's not to say we won't be doing it in the future. The point of the comment earlier was to inform everyone that this could be something we'll pursue if we feel the need to.

Change wrote:

I’m just trying to carefully raise a question whether that hour should be spend on notifying users on big name apps & news/reviews, or big name apps & small name apps of all platforms, or just wonderful, original news/reviews and leave the update notifications to other, more specialized sites. Perhaps interesting for a poll? :P

We've pondered not doing the Daily Downloads, but they have actually become a strong aspect of our site. Everyday it's one of our most visited articles, and people frequently email me with compliments on the icon concoctions that I come up with. So I think it will be sticking around for the time being.

Kat wrote:

I like the daily downloads, but if you’re going to make me click through, maybe I’ll unsubscribe altogether. I’ve been pruning feeds from my reader and the daily downloads was one of the things keeping me from unsubscribing Cybernet. I realize you need “to do what’s necessary to be successful” but if you make enough of your subscribers angry enough to leave, then you won’t be successful either.

I guess you need to do what you need to do as well. If you're trying to trim down your feeds then I would hope that we would make the cut, but it's your call as to whether we're worth the click through. We offer our content for free, and if we feel the only way to continue doing so is by cutting *some* articles off in the feed then that's what we'll do.

Street wrote:

I too understand the feed cut due to leechers (is that the right way to put it?), but I hate to have to click through. Is there another way? Maybe put ads in the feed? Tastefully done, I have no issue there.

Right now there aren't too many good solutions for advertising in feeds. We've currently got Feedburner ads but they display so infrequently that we hardly make any money off of them. We'll look into that some more though.

By: Street

Street — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:40:27 +0000

I too understand the feed cut due to leechers (is that the right way to put it?), but I hate to have to click through. Is there another way? Maybe put ads in the feed? Tastefully done, I have no issue there.

By: Kat

Kat — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:24:51 +0000

I like the daily downloads, but if you’re going to make me click through, maybe I’ll unsubscribe altogether. I’ve been pruning feeds from my reader and the daily downloads was one of the things keeping me from unsubscribing Cybernet. I realize you need “to do what’s necessary to be successful” but if you make enough of your subscribers angry enough to leave, then you won’t be successful either.

If it’s getting too hard, then maybe you should consider dropping the other OSes.

By: Change

Change — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:49:43 +0000

I’m just trying to carefully raise a question whether that hour should be spend on notifying users on big name apps & news/reviews, or big name apps & small name apps of all platforms, or just wonderful, original news/reviews and leave the update notifications to other, more specialized sites. Perhaps interesting for a poll?

(I don’t mean to interfere, please ignore me if you think I am. I just personally hope it doesn’t take away too much time from those great articles you write.. )

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:49:08 +0000

Today we actually cut the feed because of length, but we’ve been pondering doing it on a regular basis. There are quite a few sites who steal our Daily Downloads content, and this would help get around that issue for the most part. We obviously have to do what’s necessary to be successful, otherwise we may not be around much longer.

Change wrote:

Isn’t this kind of getting out of hand by the way? Seems it’s getting longer every week, which I’m sure gives you guys a lot of work.

This one was so long because we missed two days last week, but yes, they are getting longer. That’s mostly because we’ve been including software for other operating systems. And it’s definitely a lot of work… this article took over an hour to complete.

By: Change

Change — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:33:24 +0000

Heh, was wondering the same thing. Perhaps not worth checking this page if I need to load the page from the feed view everytime.. (slow – I’ll rely on my other software update feeds then)

Isn’t this kind of getting out of hand by the way? Seems it’s getting longer every week, which I’m sure gives you guys a lot of work.

By: jacques

jacques — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:39:39 +0000

Did you cut the feed because of its length ?

By: Bamboo

Bamboo — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:00:33 +0000

Why did you cut the feed? Please keep the whole thing.