Full feeds vs. Partial feeds: No difference?

In my previous entry about “5 Ways to Kill your RSS Subscribers“, I pointed out that summary feeds can turn off potential RSS subscribers. Others pointed out that providing full feeds will reduce your blog pageviews and open the gateways for scraper sites to copy your entire post. A lot of factors have been weighed in and though we aren’t really sure about how much it affects our readership or our blog’s stickiness, we often rely on our own experiences.

A recent post at the Feedburner blog debunks the notion that you get more clicks when you use summary feeds:

As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.

Though the comment was not substantiated with actual statistics, Feedburner manages 663,294 feeds and I’m sure that sample size can give us a more accurate data on feed reading behaviors of subscribers.

I used to think that summary feeds are the way to go until I switched to full feeds knowing that I could retain more readers that way. Besides, I believe that my regular readers are not only after what I wrote but with the comments other readers have left on the blog as well — and that earns me the clickthrough to my blog, not the summary feed.

React to this article:

15 Comments

ia · 19 years ago

So that’s why your feed formatting has changed! *grin*

juantanamera · 19 years ago

Honestly, Abe. Your feed looks awful on netvibes, it’s unformatted, links are disabled, and I need to visit your page just to read your posts :(

Was it intentional?

JC John SESE Cuneta · 19 years ago

Full feed is the best choice. Most news syndication sites prefer full feeds as well.

There’s really nothing we can do about spam sites using our posts, instead see it as a way of getting your message across. People will find the real source no matter what ;)

And, its true, you get more readers than a summary feed.

Jaypee · 19 years ago

Full feeds works best for my blog. I’ve had more readers and less instances of my posts being scraped.

Also, I believe that most rss readers prefer the full feeds over partial ones coz it’s more convenient. If the like the post, they’d visit the site and check out other comments or leave comments themselves.

JP Loh · 19 years ago

By the way, your feed loses the formatting of your entries. Forces me to click on the permalink just to read (even worse than partial entries, IMO). I’m using Google Reader.