The debate over whether you should publish a full or partial RSS feed re-emerges in the blogosphere once a year or so, it seems. Both sides have passionate pundits arguing for their cause, and neither seem to come to any real resolution on which is better.
As the names suggest, the difference between the two is the amount of content displayed in your RSS reader. Full means all content is displayed so there’s no reason to visit the blog. Partial means that only a short blurb is displayed so that the reader must click through to your blog to read the text.
Arguments for Full RSS
- You don’t have to visit the blog to read the content – the main reason why people like full RSS feeds is because they can read your content without having to visit your blog. It’s a one step process.
- Mobile access – If your readers generally check your blog from a handheld (ie a cell phone, PDA, etc), then they don’t have to worry about going to your page, waiting for the text and images to download, and hoping that everything displays properly on their device.
Arguments for Partial RSS
- Publishing a full RSS feed makes it easier for others to steal your content. Yes, this can happen anyway, but there’s a perception that if you publish a full feed, you’re essentially giving your content away for free. Anyone with an RSS reader can take your posts and publish them to their website, often without providing you with credit or a link.
- Blurbs are easier to skim – For those who read a lot of blogs per day, it’s far easier to read a few headlines and short blurbs than to wade through hundreds of full text posts to see if any are interesting.
- Many of the popular RSS readers like MyYahoo and Firefox only show headlines anyway.
- Bloggers want people to go to the site because they earn money through advertising. Many bloggers make extra income by running ads on their sites. While you can run ads in RSS feeds, a number of publishers have found that they just don’t convert as well as ads on the website.
Who’s Arguing What?
One of the biggest proponents for Full RSS feeds is Robert Scoble, who wrote a lengthy blog post about why he doesn’t subscribe to partial feeds earlier this year.
You can follow most of the arguments by reading through the comments people left. Great counter responses include:
- Jeremy Wright of B5Media.com
- Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineWatch.com (until Nov 2006)
- Amy Gahran of Contentious.com
- Darren Rowse of Problogger.net
Now, Scoble is part of the techie crowd, having formerly worked at Microsoft, and he’s really into gadgets. If you’re not writing a tech blog, there’s a good chance that your blog readers aren’t checking your posts from their phones or other devices – yet. Maybe they will in the future, but it takes a certain familiarity with the web that non-techies tend to shy away from.
On another note, only a handful of your readers will actually subscribe to your RSS feed. Email is still far more popular than RSS. In fact, a recent study pointed out that 88% of business people don’t know what RSS is, so we’re talking only a handful of people here that will actually read your RSS feed.
My Preference
I admit that I’m in the Partial RSS feed camp and so I choose to publish a partial RSS feed on most of my sites. I’ve experimented between the two and found that:
- I get more traffic when I publish partial vs full feeds.
- For virtually all my sites, far more people sign up for the email newsletter than subscribe via RSS.
- I make some money off of ads displayed on the page, whereas RSS advertising doesn’t see to work well.
From a personal note, I prefer to read partial content in my RSS reader because
- I think they’re easier to skim – I don’t read every post by everyone I subscribe to. Sometimes I just want to see the headlines – especially if it’s a site pulling info from a variety of sources.
- I prefer to read long text on the site rather than in the browser – I use bloglines to read posts, and for the most part, it works well, but it can screw up the formatting of the text. In many cases, the post simply looks better and is more readable on the blogger’s website.
Concluding Thoughts
I think whether you choose partial or full depends on a balance between your blogging goals (and revenue streams, if you blog for profit) and your target audience’s preference. Try one – and if you don’t like it, it’s pretty easy to switch in most blog publishing platforms.
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