Why Are Videos Showing Up Instead of Photos in the Reader?

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hmm, I don’t recall mentioning a theme, though I can see that was discussed here.

    Changing themes would not change the hierarchy of what shows up. Normally it should be featured image first, and if the featured image isn’t working, some other media item would appear. For some reason, video is taking precedence. I have let our developers know.

  • dandelionsalad · Member ·

    I am using a Featured Image on blog posts with videos now.

    Timethief suggested that I needed a new theme, and no one from WP corrected her. Was she wrong?

    Reasons why videos showing up in the Reader Feed is not a good idea:

    Sometimes the videos I post are very supplementary to the article, or just an extra, such as a music video.

    Sometimes the video is the entire blog post.

    Watching the video in the Reader, (do people really do that?) means that they will not click through to the blog post so they are missing out on the rest of the post.

    Why have the entire blog post on the Reader instead of an excerpt? Why would anyone then even bother going to the blog with its new theme?

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @dandelionsalad I’m sorry you are frustrated. I’m not here to argue with you or @timethief or anyone else. We are here to help however we can.

    I have passed your feedback to the developers, as well as a request to have the featured image displayed first.

    I can also tell you our developers aim to help you succeed. One definition of success would be that more people actually hear what you have to say, and I believe that’s what they’re after by showing your message in the reader, since so many people won’t leave the reader to click out to sites. So that I can provide better feedback, can you let me know how that fits into your definition of success, and where it’s off track? We really do welcome that feedback.

  • dandelionsalad · Member ·

    Thanks, Supernovia.

    I’ve been using WP for my blog for over 9 years now, so I remember the time before the Reader. That is when there were universal tags/categories on our blog posts, so readers could click on “Politics” and see all of WP’s blog posts with that tag/category. It used to bring in a lot of views. Readers and bloggers can still see those posts, but it’s not very easy to navigate to them. Back then, there were no large photos, or videos to take up space in the list of posts under a particular tag/category. That means, more clicks to the blog posts listed.

    Now, Reader brings in low single-digit views to my blog, although supposedly it has almost 2,000 followers.

    Maybe that is the purpose for the Reader, like Facebook’s News Feed, just a lot of scrolling and no clicking out of it.

    I don’t like using Reader to follow the blogs that I do follow. I use the Daily Digest for most of the blogs and receive the emails around the same time every day/night and actually click to read the new posts on their respective blogs.

    Thanks again for listening to me complain.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Thanks, I’ve shared that with them. :)

  • dandelionsalad · Member ·

    Thank you again, Supernovia.

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