Providing full-text or partial-text RSS feeds?

Sep 29, 2006

I’ve been using the RSS reader of Thunderbird for a year now and many of the feeds fully get downloaded before opening. Call it a personal quirk, but I still click on the accompanying link and read the posts that interest me on my browser. While doing some research for my client’s blog post I came across this post (a very old post) that rubbishes the idea of providing partial posts to the RSS subscribers so that in order to read the entire post one has to visit the website/blog (and hence help the publisher earn ad revenue).

Robert Scoble in this post says he never subscribes to feeds that send partial posts. He says you don’t respect your readers if you force them to visit your blog or website to read the complete thing. He says the more you make your readers happy, the greater is the chance that they link back to you and consequently, send traffic your way. I partially agree and partially disagree and I disagree may be because I don’t use a proper RSS reader. Whereas I’m neither biased against or in favor of full-text RSS feeds, I feel more in control when I read content on my browser. I have this tendency of opening various links in various tabs, and since blog posts are mostly replete with links, I feel confined in my RSS reader.

This is a matter of personal choice I guess. Some people like partial RSS feeds (I prefer partial RSS feeds, now that I’m writing about it) and some like full-text RSS feeds. Both options should be available on the blog and people should be able to subscribe according to their preference.

I agree that there are many ways of getting quality traffic to your blog and limiting your RSS subscriptions to partial-text feeds isn’t a very progressive step. Traffic is essential, and revenue is essential too, but they shouldn’t be preferred over visitors’ freedom to choose how they want to consume the content. Continuously publish good content for a long period, make your content as accessible as possible, and strike a personal rapport with your visitors; revenue will get generated on its own.

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3 Responses to “Providing full-text or partial-text RSS feeds?”

Lee
October 1st, 2006 at 2:11 am
Definitely in favor of full feeds! Check out http://www.fullfeeds.com/
Ed Kohler
October 4th, 2006 at 10:41 am
I’m a big fan of full feeds. Your feed reading audience most likely has blogs of their own, so making it easy for them to read your content may not bring direct financial gains but will lead to more links and traffic to your site when they write about you.
Amrit
October 5th, 2006 at 5:41 am
@Lee and @Ed:

As I said, my preference for partial feeds is quite personal, and not commercial, as I fully agree with the view that happy readers means more traffic.