TechDirt has an article explaining why full feeds lead to more page views on your site than partial feeds.
From the article:
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.
I have long had full feeds on this site and have written numerous times about the merit of full feeds.
Further, I don’t subscribe to any sites which only publish partial feeds – it is a waste of my time having to click through to read the full article on the original site.
You can be sure I am not the only one who thinks this way!
Definitely agree with this one. I have been too lenient with Silicon republic by not unsubscribing to their feed. It takes 2 clicks to get to one of their stories(only readable on their site)which is a shame because they often have stories that I haven’t seen elsewhere. I emailed them almost a year ago about the state of their feed but alas got no response:(
FT Tech blog are also doing the partial thing – anybody else I’d have unsubcribed by now.
On an unrelated topic (your del.icio.us daily post – won’t let me comment on it) – if you’re using the Firefox plugin to add these bookmarks as you browse; Selecting Text before you add to del.icio.us will automatically give some commentry as well as the link itself.
Paul
Very interesting. I’d imagine partial feeds might bring more page views in the short-term, but over time, full-feeds make your site more valuable and will help regular visitors grow and, as TechDirt says, get involved in spreading the word (social tagging / linking, sending links, linking on blogs, etc.).
@Paul – thanks for the heads up on the del.icio.us post
Nicely put. I too don’t subscribe to partial posts, unless the content is quite compelling.
The other annoyance is that a Google Blogsearch RSS feed only returns partial posts, so full posts will be truncated anyway.
Hurray!
Silicon Rebublic are now providing full feeds. I wonder what changed their minds. Good post Tom