Rick Klau, Feedburner’s VP of Publishing Services, has disclosed some very interesting findings regarding RSS feed consumption by users. According to Rick:
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. 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.
The finding has challenged the widely held assumption by the publishers that “a partial feed generates more click throughs and hence more traffic to the site”. Partial feeds are ones that carry only a paragraph or so from the original article, with links at the bottom pointing back to the site. Of course, more click backs will mean more advertisement, which in turn means more money for the bloggers.
Bloggers who used to offer full feeds had this thought in the back of their mind, that they are leaving a good amount of cash on the table. An assumption that the finding strongly refutes. The finding does not change anything for Startup Meme, because we have always offered full feed, and have also set the Wordpress layout to display full post on the site. Although Rick has not compared displaying full posts vs excerpts of the posts on the blogs, I strongly believe that the same principles hold in this case as well.
A while back I wrote an email to Allen Stern from CenterNetworks saying:
Allen I am a reader of your blog since Jan, and I really like it. However I just want to share my user experience with you. There is one feature in your blog that really annoys me and it is this “come inside for more”. This really annoys me, I think of it to be synonymous to the old media tactic of charging and asking the users to subscribe and pay money to read the content. Times have changed and now in the attention economy, this might not be tolerated for long.
Allen promptly listened and made the necessary changes immediately, and I am happy about it because I can now scan his blog quickly. John Battelle however wants to put these findings to test and has decided to offer a partial feed. This move has attracted widespread retaliation, with many readers threatening to unsubscribe in case John moves on with his plans.
Business and Revenues are an artifact of user love and loyalty with the service. People and companies who try to maximize profits at the expense of user comfort, could neither get their users’ love nor money. I have always believed that you need to let go, to get back. Last week I inserted adsense code on the site, but a couple of days later I found out that the javascript is messing with the layout of the site in IE. Although the users of this site who use IE, runs in tens, and although I made a good amount in those two days (at that rate I could generate revenues in four figures each month), I immediately took down the ads. For me users come first, Google employed the same approach and rejected pop up ads, the de-facto advertisement model of the time. Their quest to find out user friendly mechanism to serve ads eventually led to Adsense, a system that many term as the greatest product of Google after the Search. Those of you who don’t want to use full feeds out of the fear of content being used by scrapper sites, check out this excellent post by Dan over at The Wrong Advices.
[via]
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Shoaib Hashmi - June 30, 2008 - Bloglines gets a makeover and stuffs in advertising
Bilal Hameed - August 9, 2008 - Feedly is a Firefox Version of Google Reader
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Bilal Hameed - September 5, 2008
Feedburner says they’ve seen no evidence of a difference but they don’t really explain what they mean or reveal any data, i.e., there’s no way to evaluate that claim.
The only person I know who went from partial to full feeds said she saw an immediate drop in visitors to her site.
Of course, if one is monetizing the feed, it’s ok to not get the traffic back to the site but the one big downside of full feed publishing is seeing one’s complete content appearing on aggregator sites. That’s particularly unpleasant when they’re stripping out your ads and running your content next to their ads.
As a web publisher who’s been dealing with these issues for quite a while, I found Dan’s post unconvincing.
Bottom line on feedburner’s claims: show me the data and we can take it from there.
Clyde the bottom line of feedburner’s claim is “switch to full feeds because we can serve ads in the feeds and hence let you monetize.”
But I think that the overall assumption holds, as full feeds are a better option for me as a user. I always ask myself what I want as a user and then go on to choose the same for my users. My full text posts are being hosted on other sites, and to be honest I really don’t care, If they are spreading the word and making others know what I think and say thats fine with me.
I really am not concerned with monetization, that will happen with time.
I agree with Clyde that the argument as it stands is not convincing. “Consumption oriented” vs. “transactionaly focused” is very abstruse language, and not at all clear. It is certainly the case that being able to put ads into the feeds themselves will help battle the inevitable drop in page-oriented traffic.
Bigger picture, I think you Bilal are precisely correct that what will matter most is being able to find the posts and what they relate to in the world, via the network of links leading into and out of posts, and that partial feeds will be unable to participate in this process. Value to the user is diminished thereby.
One way around this is to have lots of nice “other stuff” in the blog itself, sidebars, blogrolls etc, and great design as well, which will make the blog a destination in and of itself, and the (full content) RSS feed merely something of a quick notification mechanism.