This has been bugging me for a while ... but I bit my tongue and bided my time. But now is the time; I'm taking a stand.
Blogs that only offer partial feeds through their RSS readers drive me nuts! And I'm going to stop reading them.
I understand the reasons that people do it:
- So my ads will get
seenclicked on - So my stats will stay high
- I want to show off my design
- I have stuff in my side bar(s) that I want people to see
And I'm sure there are more.
But here's the thing ... those are all ME reasons. They are not "My Reader Needs" or "My Customer Wants" or "My Audience Desires" reasons.
Also ... for those of you who might think a) I'm crazy and b) partial feeds drive clicks, I refer you to my notes from a talk given by Steve Olechowski (Cofounder and COO at Feedburner, one of the bright lights in RSS feeds) where he said:
The more text you make available in a feed, the more traffic you will have (this is counter-intuitive to a number of marketers who make users visit their sites to view the whole post).
Interestingly, I just hopped on over to Steve's blog where he discusses a current campaign by Brazillian bloggers to get full feeds going over partial feeds.
It says ... the "broken" feed icon with "Is this how you offer your feed? Help your reader. Offer your full feed."
He goes on to explain his take on it ...
Subscribers certainly prefer full feeds. For publishers, I've seen it time and time again - increasing your feed subscribers will increase your total traffic. Feed subscribers are a separate audience from people who visit the site. You need to grow both those audiences, and the total traffic back to your site will not decrease. Even if the percentage of people who click back to the site decreases, 10% of 1000 is greater than 50% of 100. get it?
Steve's a smart guy and knows way more than I do about this. But here's my take on it ...
As a consumer of content, I have chosen a feed reader after much consideration. And my time is limited .. and I want to stay in the environment that I have choosen. The more time I spend visiting sites to read content I've already read part of in my feed reader, the less overall time I have to read content.
So this is it .. I'm stopping the madness. Partial feeds are getting relegated to a special "On Hiatus" section in my reader. And I'm not reading them for a month. And we'll see if I miss the content or not.
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