During our Tuesday morning commute I read this article from TechDirt speaking about RSS feeds. A lot of sites offer partial feeds and usually just the headline to try and persuade you to read the article on the site exposing you to their advertising. Sites like CNET do this and it pisses me off and seeming I read these articles in a RSS Reader on my mobile phone while I am on the train I can not just click through. So only the BEST of the BEST articles get read by me - You know just the ones that stick out in me head later in the day.
TechDirt as well as AtA use full RSS feeds because one we don't have ADs on our site as we are not about making $$$ and Two We are here to help our readers. These quotes from the above mentioned articles made us go YEAH! You go get em!
...Techdirt, of course, offers full feeds and always has. This means that plenty of people who read this site absolutely never visit the site. We're fine with that for a variety of reasons (one of which being that our business model isn't dependent on page views or ad impressions).
...in our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. 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...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.
So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage....
Full feeds can actually drive more traffic overall.
We agree 1000% get your readers loyalty by giving them what they want - not treating them like cattle. Mooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
_AskTheAdmiN_
