Lukas Mathis on Safari Reader

> 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. I absolutely agree. I talked about this a while ago, when Ars Technica went on a rant about ad blockers. If users are finding ways around your revenue stream, you need to rethink how you finance your site.

I’ve been an avid user of Instapaper now for quite a while, so I doubt I’ll be using Safari Reader a lot. My workflow goes from GoogleReader (via the web app on my Mac or Reeder on the iPhone) and Twitter for iPhone, to Instapaper. I basically never see the original site any article is published on anymore. No ads. No “surfing” to find content. I choose from headlines that interest me in my Google Reader feed, or links that look interesting from the people I follow on Twitter. I send them all to Instapaper to read later. I read everything as if it were a page of a book. Clean, black text on a white background. No distractions. The Instapaper apps for the iPhone and iPad are world class. The web-based version works perfectly on the Mac or PC.

As long as I’m diligent about finding good RSS feed sources to add to Google Reader, and I continue to follow interesting people on Twitter, I always have tons of great content to read. More than I can handle, usually.

I do think Safari Reader will eventually be obsolete. Instapaper, however, or some service like it, is destined to be the way people access information in the future, as far as I’m concerned. Forget going out to a thousand places to get content. Let the content come to you.

I’ll say it again; the ad-based web is not going to last forever. Figure out some other way to monetize your content.