Want People to Read Your Blog? Go With a Full Text Feed

Someone should commission a study on bloggers who choose to syndicate the full text of their posts in RSS feeds vs. those who abstain. Something tells me they're read more. Consider the contrasts between these two bloggers.

Exhibit A: Leon Ho from Lifehack.org

In a little over a year and a half, Leon grew his blog from zero to 12,000 subscribers. This includes 474 subscribers on Bloglines. He credits a full-text feed.

"The feed entry needs to give something readers can read," he says. "You must give some special privileges to the regular readers. Save their time by reading your posts on the feed. I love full feed, and I am holding back myself on subscribing to partial feeds." Good advice.

Exhibit B: Donna Bogatin's DIgital Markets Blog

If you haven't perused it lately, Donna Bogatin's blog is really good. She puts a ton of compelling content out there - and quite often. However, her feed is only partial text. I suspect this limits her feed subscribers. On Bloglines she has 12 subscribers (a full report of her feed subscribers is unavailable; Donna I am sure will correct me if I am wrong.)

Now it's not quite fair to compare these two, I will admit. However, it's becoming more apparent to me that the bloggers who syndicate full text are among the most well-read. Take a look at the Technorati Top 100.  A lot of these bloggers are full-texters. Anyone up for a little analysis?

Comments

[Karine Joly]

I hope your post will convince bloggers in higher ed marketing to get back to the full feed option. Lately, my RSS reader has been hit by a diet: blogs that were offering full feeds switched to partial feeds, which is really a pain. At the end of the day, I tend to read less often the offenders.

I've chosen to stick to my full feed because that's what I like as a reader. So, why should my readers get a different treatment?

Anyway, I appreciate you stick to it as well. Thanks!

[Amanuel]

If a blogger doesn't provide a full feed I delete my subscription right there on the spot and they will not get a second chance as I'll probably not try to subscribe again.

With over 100+ posts to read every morning, I will not allow a blogger to add to my day load by making it orders of magnitude harder to read their ramblings.

[Stijn Vogels]

Having dealt with partial feeds myself, I can say that I do prefer full text feeds. My feed reader contains several feeds that list only a summary of their articles, but thankfully those are only a minority.

Some people also provide ads in their feeds. When I compare the summarised feeds with the commercialised ones, I must confess that I'd rather read the full, commercialised one in stead of the summaries.

Deciding which stories seem interesting enough for you to read is mostly decided by impulse. When you're forced to click and wait to read, that can sometimes be enough to not read the rest of an entry. And when that happens a lot, I do tend to just unscribe.

I agree with Amanuel: if you provide a feed, you should at least have the decency to provide full content.

[MG Siegler]

I was only sticking with summary feed because of the horror stories I'd heard about bots stealing full stories.

But you're right on all points, the non-full feeds just kind of annoy me when I'm reading them.

You've convinced me. Full feed it is.

[Kevin Burton]

I don't think the real data backs your hypothesis.

I did some cursory analysis of Tailrank data based on our rankings and there seems to be a direct correlation between A-listers and summary feeds.

It's more an issue of bandwidth, tracking, and ads. People enable summary feeds to solve one or all of these issues.

I'd LOVE to be proven wrong though :)

[Ryan Stewart]

I agree Steve, while all of the data may not back it up, I think full text feeds help grow the brand. I hope we ZDNet bloggers get full feeds.

[Simos]

Well, that's right about full feeds but if you want ads in your blog, by putting all the information on the feed, the readers don't visit your site and they don't click on the ads... So you just put the essential to make them visit you... That's for now Mr Rubel because as the trackers and the urls die, we should configure a new way of putting ads in our pages. That's RSS ads.. but Adsense isn't ready yet..

[Eric Rice]

I just posted on this on my blog and somewhat see it as a non-issue minutia split, however, are we benefitting from consuming every last bit of data that anyone and everyone publishes?

[jlewin]

Steve

I agree that this would be a great thing to test - but the question you pose could lead to a classic marketing mistake - measuring the wrong thing.

Shouldn't the question be whether full feeds or partial feeds are better at delivering the sites' goal, - typically ad clickthroughs?

It would be a mistake to look at this without considering the topic area of the blog, too. A blog that focuses on technology may gain by having full feeds, because geeks use feed readers. A blog about non-tech topics, though, might not benefit at all, but just open itself up to wholesale site cloning by using full text feeds.

The only thing that's clear with this so far is that geeks like full-text feeds.

[Elise Bauer]

Steve, 2 data points a trend does not make. I have over 18,000 feed subscribers and have never published a full feed. I do however, give a photo and a nice chunk of text in the feed that I send out. I like summaries, as long as they show me enough to get me interested. The main reason I don't publish a full feed is content theft. Aggregators love to pull my feed, but at least they are not getting all the content, and the feed includes plenty of link-backs to my site.

[Kate]

Steve ... research from Feedburner bears out what you're seeing. Steve Olechowski talked about this last Fall at The Future of Web Apps.

I blogged about Feedburner's report: http://www.mynameiskate.ca/2006/09/steve_olechowsh.html and http://www.mynameiskate.ca/2006/11/offering_partia.html

[Frank Roche]

I am systematically eliminating partial-feed blogs from my Google Reader. I agree that regular readers need "something extra," and I think the "click me" mentality is to blame. I do click over from Reader to blogs when I want to comment...but I'm finding myself less and less likely to click at all on partials. Their loss.

[Petar Vasić]

What about the comments?

I prefer full text feeds, but I'm less likely to read the comments that way, and some times comments are more usefull than the article...

[Kosso]

Naturally, full text in feeds will aid knowledge/opinion sharing right from the aggregators, but it will surely diminish traffic to the originating sites, which it might rely on.

There's a reason why BBC journos have to fill in two 'body/summary' fields when they post a story to their website. One being a short paragraph to describe the story - this is used in the RSS feed. The rest of the story is naturally at the site.

It took them a while to understand this, before they published RSS feeds, but since adopting this method, the traffic flow from RSS feed links went through the roof!

[Tom]

Great post Steve!. Personally I think the full RSS feed is the only way to go, and when I recently did a study of the Top 100 Technorati Blogs, I found this is the most common practice in the blogosphere. You can see the study at:

http://www.onlinebulletin.net/commentary/the-rss-debate-full-vs-partial-blog-feeds.html

[Steven Hodson]

I have used full text on my RSS feeds since day one of the blog and wouldn't think of doing otherwise.

Readers of RSS feeds typical I believe very rarely will click through on a partial feed item to read the whole thing .. it s a read what is there and continue on to the next so your message or content will never get the full impact.

[Greg]

Steve -

Your on it, full feed syndication is the only way to go, no doubt about it. Partial feed syndication is down right annoying :-) If I am interested in the comments on a full feed post, then I will click through to read them. Thanks for posting about this.

Greg

[Robert Scoble]

I've been saying this for four years now. Nice to see some other people agreeing with me.

I have started reading some partial text feeds lately cause their content is so overwhelmingly compelling that I feel compelled to subscribe. But those are VERY rare (ZDNet is among the most memorable) and I definitely talk about those feeds far less often (and link to them) far less often than I would if they were full-text feeds.

[Pietr]

Hi Steve, I've been thinking about this myself, and I recently shifted to half feeds to see if I'd get extra readers...

I am actually interested in your personal view on this. I'm tracking you through Klipfolio, and I only get half feeds in. So now I'm wondering a bit on what you actually mean in the text above. You don't actually take a stand, do you...?

This is true. With very rare exceptions, I only read fulltext RSS.