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Why You Should Use Full Feeds

Using full feeds to disseminate your content over RSS may seem silly. After all, if people can consume all your content through their RSS reader, they have no incentive to visit your site. Whereas if you only provide them with a snippet from the entirety of the content, then they have to click through to your website to read more, there by increasing page views, right? Not quite, according to Rick Klau, the Vice President of Publishing Services at FeedBurner.

According to his commentary from a few days ago,

First of all, I think the primary justification often given for partial feeds - that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher's site - is off-base... Feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We've seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.

The main reason for wanting to get readers to click through to one's content (by using partial feeds) would be to get more advertisement impressions, to which Rick responds by mentioning feed monetizing options (which one is more profitable may ultimately be debatable). Apart from that, Dan brings up an important issue, that of RSS content-scraping which may prevent some people from publishing full feeds, but then himself provides the solution:

1. Use internal linking.

2. Install the Feed Copywriter plugin and add a copyright message and return link to the bottom of your feed.

3. Regularly check Copyscape to see if anyone is using your content.

With protection against scrapers available, along with the ability to easily monetize your feed, and knowing that people are much more likely to subscribe to full feeds rather than partial feeds, what's keeping you from making the entirety of your content available through RSS feeds? Mike Arrington is doing it, and so are Richard MacManus and Pete Cashmore. What's holding you back?

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Marketing Pilgrim, April 23, 2007

“Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors” — Conventional wisdom tells us that if you publish partial feeds, people will click through to your site to read the rest of your story. The truth is that it just doesn’t work out that way. FeedBurner’s VP of Publishing Services, FeedBurner...

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“Around the Net 4/24/2007” — Lots of links after my Chicago trip: Are you a web guru? [Shoemoney] The Future of Blogging. [problogger] keyword domains for long-term SEO [searchenginejournal] Create a 2nd Blog [Daily Blog Tips] Why to use Full Feeds [Pronet Advertising] How to Na...

Avinash, April 22, 2007

Great article! I used to publish partial RSS feeds in the start but soon I noticed that I won't get much subscribers showing excerpts.

Since the day I started using full feeds, my feed subscribers have increased. By the way, there are options available to drag feed readers to your blogs pretty easily. One of them is the use of GreyBox plugin. Bloggers just need to learn what works and what doesn't.

• Avi

matthew, April 22, 2007

trying to monetize your feed is pretty much a useless endeavor. rss ads generate negligable revenue and, as the comment above confirms, partial feeds do not drive folks back to the site.

giving away your content via a full feed is basically giving away your content for free. that's exactly what rss was designed for. if your site is ad-supported, and you're worried about lost revenue due to rss, don't have an rss feed.

Joel Mueller, April 22, 2007

We swtiched to full RSS feeds at MacUpdate, and haven't seen any increase in subscribers. We actually got a number of emails from upset people saying the feeds take too long to load, and that RSS is made to be super fast loading.

Derek Rogerson, April 22, 2007

If a content publisher doesn't provide a full feed I won't subscribe. Tease somebody else.

If the content is good enough, however, I will use a free site scraper to create my own independent proprietary feed.

Adrienne Doss, April 22, 2007

Heh, can you send this post over to Aaron at SEO Book? Maybe with a little "hint hint, elbow nudge, wink wink"? I love his content, but I hate having to leave my beloved Google Reader to see the full story.

Charity, April 23, 2007

This is a great tip. I've been using partial feeds and never really considered what kind of drawbacks that choice would have. It's also an interesting conundrum - whether or not to offer full content in a feed. Sounds like there are good arguments on both sides, though I think I'll opt for the full feed now and see if it makes a difference in my subscriber base.

Andrew Ferguson, April 26, 2007

I'm curious to know if this plugin works with FeedBurner, but the documentation on their site doesn't address it.

I also couldn't help but notice that you guys are recommending this plugin as a way of protecting your RSS Feed, but you don't seem to be using it. What's the deal?