Maybe this is old news, maybe this is really really old news, or maybe it’s just an ongoing debate that I’ve finally decided to throw my two cents in (actually I did write about this on another blog, but I can’t show you that yet).
I have recently found myself discussing with other bloggers and blog readers the issue of RSS feeds. Specifically, which do people prefer – full or partial RSS feeds?
A quick recap -
Full = you can read the whole article in your RSS reader so there is no need to view the blog.
Partial = you get a truncated summary of the blog feed and if you want to read the full article you have to click through to the blog.
If you are new to RSS read What Is RSS?.
My original stance was that I voted for full feeds for two main reasons -
- It bugged me when using my feedreader of choice, RSSOwl, that I had to click through and wait for a blog page to load to read the full article. In most cases I wouldn’t bother. I assumed there were other people like me having the same reaction and as such the content would never get read. I didn’t want this happening to my blog so I had full feeds on.
- The purposes of my blogging is primarily to be read. Everything else is secondary, by-products of me being read. I may want people to click an AdSense link, buy an affiliate product, join my email list or bookmark my site but none of these actions can occur without someone first reading my blog. I want a loyal following of readers. I want people to know who Yaro Starak is. To facilitate this I choose full feeds to reduce resistance and ensure as many people as possible read me, either at the blog or in the feed.
I stand by this decision and full feeds will always be available from my blogs. However due to some recent conversations and reading I’ve realized there is an audience for partial feeds as well. In particular the “feed skimmers” are readers I may be loosing by not making partial feeds available. The feed skimmers scan through their feeds quickly, reading headlines and page summaries looking for content that might interest them. They want short summaries, not full text so they can scan quickly and digest only the content they want to read.
I believe good headings facilitate feed skimmers well enough but having feed summaries of could further help to capture this audience.
The Feed Solution
The answer to the full or partial feed debate in my mind is to let the people decide. Why can’t the choice of full or partial feeds be available within the feedreader itself? In simple form there could be a single option to choose between full or partial feeds. More complex options could include defining this choice on a blog-by-blog basis or a category-by-category basis. The options no doubt could become very customized limited only by the imagination and creativity of programmers and bloggers.
What About Advertisements!
One of the big concerns for professional bloggers is that their advertisements won’t be read if everyone is bypassing their normal ad-laden blog for the nice clean text-only feed. I could argue that advertisements perform better when they are subtle recommendations embedded within the article itself, but that’s not going to make the AdSense fans very happy. The simple fact is they lose income if people read their blog only through feedreaders. Unfortunately AdSense for feeds and other similar services for feeds don’t perform nearly as well as standard website AdSense so it’s not an adequate income replacement.
The answer could be that bloggers can choose to make full or partial feeds available as per usual, then if they choose full feeds the user can manipulate the feed in all kinds of ways within their feedreader of choice, converting to partial feeds if they prefer. Whatever the solution I think the power should be with the people, but of course the concerns of the publisher are important too. If they don’t get what they require to keep blogging then no one will have feeds to subscribe to at all.
Chances are all these ideas are already implemented somewhere over the rainbow or at least in development. The issue as always – how to keep it simple enough that people will actually use it and how to gain traction leading to mainstream adoption and standardization so as to reduce confusion.
For the meantime, I make full feeds available from my blogs and I only subscribe to other blogs that have full feeds.
I too prefer full feeds but I am also a feed skimmer but that’s fine because most posts are bite-sized.
I think many are taking a short-term view of possibly loosing out on immediate AdSense clicks whereas I see it as if you provide quality content over time I’m more prone to actually visit your blog.
Remember also that most people still visit blogs via their browsers and rss is still relatively in the early adopter stage – and I think such early adopters are fairly ad blind.
Now, most of your posts Yaro … bloody massive reads.
Now that’s one instance where I’d gladly take a partial feed 
Yaro, full feeds, without exception. When I had partial feeds, and when Blogger occasionally provides partial feeds without my asking it, I get complaints. I have no complaints when I use full feeds. As to skimmersâ€â€I will skim the odd siteâ€â€I can do that myself (rather than rely on a machine to do the editing for me). I just scroll fasterâ€â€easy.
I think many are taking a short-term view of possibly loosing out on immediate AdSense clicks whereas I see it as if you provide quality content over time I’m more prone to actually visit your blog.
Agreed. I wonder how we can test this theory out? Many significant bloggers (hi Darren!) have partial feeds on and I’m fairly certain it’s the money issue. Unfortunately it’s not easy to determine how many people are *not* reading an article because only a summary feed is made available.
I see two worries for why people have partial feeds: To make sure that somebody clicks to their site, where they can be served ads, or to keep their feeds from being stolen and republished.
Myself, I publish full feeds, and prefer to subscribe to full feeds. My feed reader takes partial feeds and will actually load the website page in my reader rather than showing me the partial. If the website is down, I can always switch to text mode and see what the partial feed says.
The only problem with that was that feedreader broke that on some of my feeds I subscribe to when they had those email and comment images plopped into the bottom. Oh well.
I personally like full feeds as bloggers we want the content read, all the extras (adsense, newsletters, etc) are all just that extras.
I think the main reason it causes problems using partial feeds, is the fact that most bloggers don’t think about it when they write. Most people warm up to a topic, and if they do that it is likely not to interest any readers, because the beginning is intro, fluff, or non-relevant to the title.
IF you are going to use partial, hit the meat of in those first few sentences even if it is just a snippet of what you will cover. As this is likely to increase your chances of feed readers / skimmers to actually click thru to your site.
That is also good advice for full feed bloggers too, as skimmers still read titles, and sometimes a few sentences (it just isn’t as important).
Solution: Full FEED
I blogged about this last week because I felt that a post by Scoble hit the nail on the head about why you should not publish partial feeds.
What I dislike about partial feeds is how they cut off mid sentence. grrrr…
If a blogger wants to publish partial feeds (for the skim readers), then I recommend using the ‘Better Feed’ wordpress plugin where you can set the cut off point for the partial feed.
I subscribe to lots of feeds and the only partial one comes from 9rules. Man I hate it. I only subscibed to the feed yesterday and I’m almost ready to remove it today. Partial feeds, to me, seem to undo every reason I have a feed reader in the first place. I don’t want to leave netvibes, I don’t want any more tabs open – I have too many already, I love the instantaneous nature of a feedreader and hate waiting for another blog to load. I’m a skimmer, but do so on titles and definately think you’re right that viewers should have a choice (and if you can convince 9rules you’re right too, you get extra points
)
Hi,
I prefer Full RSS Feeds.
As there are a number of web sites that are behind
Internet filter and censorship that can not be accessed via internet.
One question:
I don’t know how to create full text RSS feeds,
Any source or help is highly appreciated.
Regards,
Karim
Glad to see this discussion – I was researching whether to publish full or partial feeds, and you’ve made up my mind – full feeds it shall be! Thanks, guys, and you’ve got a great site, Yaro. I admire your entrepreneurial spirit and your success to date.
Hi Yaro, hi guys.
It’s a very interesting subject. I’m currently using partial feeds but I don’t have enough data to say if it’s working ok or not. I’ll keep checking and may change to full in a few weeks and test for another couple of months.
It’s not a very scientific test but at least I could get an idea.
The site I’m talking about it’s only two months online.
I’m using Drupal as my CMS and I can decide the teaser I want to use, I usually try to get a good headline, a compelling one, and the meat of the my article in the first paragraph. By using this teaser function I have control over what is shown and there are not sentences cut in the middle.
I am subscribed to many blogs and as a reader I also prefer full feeds but quite often I click in my feed reader (I use rojo.com) and go to the site.
As a publisher I want readers to come visit my site and I think that good posts that invite users to be a part of the discussion can get that, when users want to comment they have to visit the site.
Regards!
Full feeds for sure! Check out http://www.fullfeeds.com/
I’m not concerned about advertising because I don’t start ads on pages until they are a few days old, so I’m not missing anything by having a full feed.
But I offer both, because some people (I’m one) WANT partial feeds. I read a lot of feeds, and want to be able to skim the excerpt to see if I do want to read the whole thing.
Interestingly, I’ve been tracking the growth and full feeds are not necessarily as popular as people think they are. “Full feed” is the defualt at my site, which means extra work if you want partial, yet partial stats still grow: http://aplawrence.com/Web/fullorpartial.html