Overcoming RSS (Repetitive Statistics Syndrome)
A look at a common affliction among domainers.
Thousands of people suffer daily from Repetitive Statistics Syndrome (RSS). RSS is an obsessive compulsive disorder that involves checking revenue statistics from programs such as Google Adsense and domain parking multiple times a day. RSS sufferers know that checking their statistics repeatedly will not increase the final revenue number at the end of the day, but they can’t bring themselves to stop checking stats. This article will discuss RSS and what can be done regarding it.
History of RSS. RSS began with early incarnations of public e-mail services such as AOL and Prodigy. People who were fresh to e-mail would check their accounts multiple times each hour to make sure they quickly knew if one of their friends had forwarded a funny picture of a cat to them or if they needed to send out a chain letter to 7 people in order to stave off bad luck. This was called RES for Repetitive Email Syndrome.
In the late 90s, RSS took form and started afflicting internet marketers and publishers. They would log into their web statistics programs to see how many hits they had that day. Later, they realized that hits didn’t mean anything. But when affiliate programs and later Google Adsense hit the scene, RSS exploded.
Current Issues. Today, RSS is an issue the nation is just beginning to wake up to. “Domainers” often times log into Google Adsense and three different domain parking firm sites throughout the day to see how many clicks at 3 to 17 cents they’ve received. Logging in doesn’t improve their stats, but RSS sufferers start to feel lonely and depressed if they don’t have up-to-the-minute stats.
Remedies and Help. Thankfully, psychiatric organizations and drug manufacturers are starting to address the problem. For Repetitive E-mail Syndrome, Research in Motion released the Blackberry. Unfortunately, this just exacerbated the problem. Therapists advise domainers and internet marketers not to download applets that log-in to parking accounts automatically to pull statistics as this is similar to having “a Crackberry for stats”.
Pfizer is filing a patent to use a fresh form of Zoloft to treat RSS. There are self-support groups on the web that try to pry people away from domain name forums where people obsess regarding their revenue “being off two dollars today from this time yesterday”. Unfortunately, these self help groups exist on the actual domain forums.
If you or someone you know suffers from RSS, please, get help.
