April 18, 2007
Rick's Ruminations: Full Feeds
David Churbuck's recent post imploring bloggers to publish full feeds reminded me that I've been meaning to comment on this for a while. It's a subject I speak on regularly at SES, and some of the recommendations I make are not the same ones you see made on a number of blogs.
First of all, 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.
Secondly, the reason many larger publishers give for trying to steer traffic back to the site is that they can make money on the site. Guess what? You can monetize feeds as well - giving you the option of deciding where and how you want to monetize your audience, instead of assuming that the feed's sole purpose is to drive traffic back to your site (which is a dubious proposition anyway).
I did an interview on Monday where the podcaster asked me how to make feeds "stickier". What he was actually asking was how to get readers more engaged with feed content: how can feeds be made more interactive? A lot of the thinking behind FeedFlare was that we needed a way to give publishers tools to increase the likelihood that readers would in fact engage. Clicking through to read a copy of the post they just read is unlikely to drive a lot of click activity. But clicking through to read the comments will. Bookmarking the post at del.icio.us will drive further activity, as will voting for the post at Digg. (And in those latter examples, they'll both increase secondary traffic growth, by building awareness of your content at those sites.) In other words, adding opportunities for the readers to do things other than just read a copy of the post goes a long way to increasing the probability that the readers will actually do something.
Too few publishers take advantage of the next logical step: building their own FeedFlare units to direct attention to other parts of the publisher's site. If you publish archives by category, why not give readers the ability to browse more articles like the one they just read by going to the category archive? Promoting an event? Do what the folks at TechPresident are doing and include a link to the event with every post:
That link gets seen by everyone subscribed to the feed, dramatically increasing the visibility of the Personal Democracy Forum event (disclosure: I'm speaking at PdF, and FeedBurner's a sponsor). Creating this FeedFlare takes less than five minutes, and it's then something you can share with anyone else who wants to support the event. (I won't go into all the variations here, but creating FeedFlares for fundraising, micro-sites for a specific function, etc., all make a ton of sense. You get the idea.) At this point, the feed is not just a way of distributing content, but is equally about driving awareness and delivering actions - just not all focused exclusively on the individual post.
There's another angle to publishing full feeds that doesn't get a lot of attention: the value of links contained in the posts themselves. Sites like TechMeme do a great job of finding links between blog posts and giving heavily-linked posts more visibility. Aggregators can (but often don't) use these links in interesting ways. Three years ago, I wrote about my favorite feature of my preferred aggregator at the time (SharpReader) - threaded RSS. I would absolutely love to see this feature implemented in Google Reader, where I could navigate through my subscriptions by seeing what links the posts had in common... it would add tremendous value to the interface, and expose connections between posts that are otherwise all but impossible to glean from casual browsing.
FeedDemon fans will be happy to see that Nick Bradbury has added a pretty slick feature to the latest FeedDemon beta called "Popular Topics". Here's a screen shot from FeedDemon 2.5, showing one of the most-linked-to posts across my 200 subscriptions:
In addition, FeedDemon also shows you the most linked-to posts across the NewsGator Online user base, which is a great way to leverage the NewsGator community to surface interesting content you might not otherwise see.
My personal wishlist aside, the value of the full post is that it exposes the links between the posts in the feed and other posts out on the web. These links are sometimes (and, I predict, increasingly will be) leveraged by other services and applications, which can generate additional exposure for your content. Which is sort of why you're publishing a feed in the first place, right?
Comments
So that's why FB added the option to build my own flares recently! :-)
Stupid Question of the Day:
What is a Partial Feed?
What is a Full Feed?
Bruce Wagner
http://brucewagner.com
We covered a lot of technical details in our half-hour conversation and think there are novice bloggers who will listen to the podcast several times before they understand the information that you shared. Thanks for that.
On full or excerpts feeds, I believe in consumer choice - Dick Costolo liked the howto I posted a while ago on using Feedburner plus some Javascript to offer readers subcriptions to full or excerpts or even headlines-only feeds, at their option.
But talking about monetising just won't be enough to encourage bloggers to output full feeds. Not until services like Feedburner take a leaf from Google's AdSense book and actually allow even relatively small publishers like me to include ads in their feeds (on the long tail, aggregation of the many principle). No doubt Feedburner has other priorities, but this one shouldn't be lost sight of.
In fact I am now even considering reverting to excerpts-only feeds for my own blog. I've no monetisation incentive for full feeds (although I'm doing increasingly well on AdSense so on the contrary I'd want readers to go to my blog rather than my feed).
Plus I have the disincentive that, as my blog becomes more popular, full feeds allow spammers and rip-off artists to increasingly copy my content all too easily.
Feedflares are definitely a great innovation though. More and more, feeds are mirroring blogs in what's available to the consumer, e.g. the social bookmarking and ability to email, and with tools like Feedflare, I can see it all converging sooner rather than later.
All good advice
Full posts to feed allow all readers to decide whether to visit rather than making it essential (and sometimes annoying) so I changed my feeds to make that the default.
Over time I've deleted feeds that are only partial and so I realise people might also do that to my feeds as well.
Thnaks for raising the issue again.
@Bruce - A "full" feed is one in which the entire contents of the blog entry (or article if the feed isn't coming from a blog) are reproduced in the feed; a partial feed is one in which only a few sentences are included. Producers of partial feeds are hoping that readers will then clickthrough back to the website to read the remainder of the post.
@Improbulus: Helping publishers of all sizes monetize their content is absolutely a priority here at FeedBurner, and we'll be sharing some more thoughts on that front in the not-too-distant future. You're right, this discussion needs to cover publishers large and small, not just the big guys.
Re: "rip-off artists", I've seen several people comment on full feeds making it easier to "scrape" content. We take that concern seriously, and based on some of the comments I've seen (yours as well as others), I think that'll be my next "rumination" - to talk about the issues involved and what we can do to help protect against unwanted uses of your feeds.
I absolutely agree with Improbulus. Until I have the option of adding Feedvertising to my feed, despite my relatively small reader base (if ca. 300 is considered small) I'll have to stick with excerpts.
I came to blogging while working as Internet Operations manager at a magazine publishing house that had monetized their website and offered the full contents of their mags online as they came off the press. The site was operating in the black due to volume, downloadable sales, and advertising. So there was a lot of strategy behind the scenes in using the print publications and the e-newsletters to promote the site. (Print advertising revenues and subs are down, so many dead-tree businesses are grasping for hope with their websites.)
I carried this way of thinking to my personal weblog and for the first year and a half I only offered excerpts. After considering the arguments pro and con, I finally offered full feeds, but found that some feed readers were still only showing the feed excerpt, so I found a plugin that eliminated the "CDATA" encoding and now my feed features the full HTML of my post.
Also, I stopped promoting my feed as just a little chicklet in the sidebar. Now the RSS feed icon is larger-than-life and is the first clickable icon in the sidebar at the top right of the page.
Till a couple months ago, I'd only had 150 subscribers. In the last month I've gained 50 more. That's a 30% gain in one month over what has taken me nearly two years to build.
Oddly enough, there's still a lot of flux in the feed subscriber base. I'll gain 20 one day, lose 15 the next. I don't understand why that would be since this kind of turnover occurs between my posting cycles, but it's interesting to watch.
Nevertheless, I've concluded that for my readers' sake, they definitely want full feeds. And I'm going to try to deliver it.
I do want to monetize my feed, but not at the expense of usability or feed "enjoyment." We'll see what FB can offer down the road.
Rich
BlogRodent
This is a great post and I appreciate you taking the time to make arguments for full feeds.
I think the one argument for partial feeds and the value of visiting the actual site/blog is that the entry content is not the entirity of a site's content.
In other words, if a web site redesigned itself, added completely new sections or content, I'd never know that by only reading from an entry content feed, partial or full.
I agree with Improbulus regarding consumer choice. I use Feed on Feeds for RSS reading. I load my site, get a list of all new articles in all of my feeds, and quickly run down the list, opening the articles I want to read in background tabs. With excerpts, I get at least three or four articles per page and can breeze past them quickly. Full articles in the listing just get in my way and slow me down. Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't want full feeds, and I only tolerate them on sites with very good content and less-than-daily updates.
