Full Text vs. Partial Text RSS Feeds

[Kristijntje]

Our blog has been in existence for over two years now but we always abstained from publishing full content RSS feeds for two selfish reasons (or you can call them fears) outlined below:

1. Since RSS Subscribers get to read the full blog content inside their newsreaders, they would never visit the actual blog site - the fear was lesser pageviews would impact the advertising revenue.

2. An ever bigger threat was from blog plagiarists and MFA Sites who would steal our content for their own sites. It takes just too much effort and time to deal with content thieves.

But as an experiment, last month we switched from partial feeds to full text feeds and the results have been beyond expectation both in terms of growth of RSS subscribers as well as revenue from blog feeds...

full article: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/do-yo...ds-or.html

[mandy]

A related article:

FeedBurner has made an interesting comment about partial feeds on the official FeedBurner blog. According to Rick there appears to be no significant difference in clickthrough rates between full and partial RSS feeds. This is particularly interesting because one of the major arguments for using a partial feed was the assumption that it would drive more readers to your site...

full article: http://thewrongadvices.com/2007/04/20/fu...rss-feeds/

[mandy]

More discussion on the full text vs. partial text RSS debate.  Two articles that suggest that  full-text feeds can actually lead to more page views.

...in our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it's that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what's being said -- which makes it much, much, much more likely that they'll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing -- and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two....

full article: http://techdirt.com/articles/20070813/014338.shtml

I’m a huge fan of the Freakonomics guys, and a subscriber to their RSS feed, but I didn’t realize until I saw a MediaPost item on Techmeme that they had been “acquired” by the New York Times. I also didn’t realize until I read through the item that they have switched to partial RSS feeds, which I absolutely loathe...

The bottom line is this: if I wanted to click through to the website, then I would just go to the damn website in the first place. Partial feeds defeat almost the entire purpose of reading RSS feeds in the first place. Bad idea, guys.

full article and comments: http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2007/08...-bad-idea/