Comments on: Partial vs Full RSS Feeds-A Business Case

By: marc meyer

marc meyer — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:32:29 +0000

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.

By: Bilal Hameed

Bilal Hameed — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:00:03 +0000

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.

By: Clyde Smith

Clyde Smith — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 04:24:09 +0000

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.