Full feed vs partial in RSS
I guess it’s the eternal debate, full feed RSS vs partial or headline only feeds. I’ve started thinking about this now that I’m a wildly successful blogger with at least 3 or 4 regular readers. Recently Seeking Alpha, a big finance blog, decided to switch from full to partial feeds, with ensuing hubub. His post enumerates a lot of the reasons people give for switching to partial feeds.
The basic problem is this, if you’re running a site, generally speaking what you really want is for people to be visiting your site. All your metrics, models and efforts are geared towards monetizing your website’s traffic. You can get a real sense of how your site is performing and it encourages people to take part in your community. When you provide a full feed rss you allow people to read your site completely out of the realm of those metrics and models. When they read your posts in an rss feed they don’t get to see any discussion going on which can encourage them to take part and they don’t see any other content around that you are trying to promote. Lastly the full feed makes it much easier for black hat SEO folks to take your content and repurpose it for their nefarious ends, which could potentially reflect badly SEOwise on your site as you will now have duplicated content.
On the other hand, People Really Like Full Feeds. So, if the goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible by whatever means, in general, it is a good idea to go full feed. Ultimately, I believe this pays you back over time because the larger your audience is the more influence your site wields and the more people will want to be on your site. Increasingly we’re discovering more ways to measure and monetize RSS feeds, Feedburner’s numbers are not (and can not) be perfect, but they are a pretty reasonable approximation.
The problem with community and extra content is a bigger one, I think. It isn’t just the original posting that people respond to, but often people are responding to an existing conversation in the postings which they see immediately after reading the article on the website. In a feed reader, they are removed from seeing that. However, it is probably a surmountable problem if one were to try - perhaps by adding snippets of the few most recent comments to the bottom of each rss entry. Or something. For sites with really dynamic discussions that might be an interesting test to try. Or tacking on a couple links to related articles at the bottom, I don’t know if people would balk at that or not, but it could be another way to promote your content.
Here’s an older post on the subject where someone makes the switch and monitors the activity. You can watch his RSS subscribership rise quickly after making the switch from partial to full. I would also have liked to have seen his unique visitors graph during the same period to see if his readership simply switched to full rss instead of coming to his site or if all or a significant portion of his rss subscribers were new readers. He also shows his revenue from ads inside the feed, although there’s a sharp dip at the end of the graph. Again, it’d be interested to see the graph for his overall revenue, to see the slope of that graph during this period.
I think most sites, most of the time are best off with full feeds. Satisfying the needs of your audience is the best way to build that audience. And eyeballs, wherever they may be, are the key to online success.
