Angry in the Great White North

My RSS feed has always been an excerpt and the Technorati tags for each story. The intention was that readers would evaluate the story's subject matter, and if they were interested, they would go to the website.

I've always assumed that traffic would suffer if I offered up all the content via the feed.

My friend Stephen Noton, an SEO specialist, told me I was cheating myself of good search engine traffic by not giving the Google blog search bot all my content to index. Made sense, so I had to wonder which would hurt more -- the loss I was suffering from missing search engine hits or the loss of click-through traffic from the feed.

It might be that I've been wrong to phrase the question that way:

People subscribing to the RSS feeds of VentureBeat or other blogs are no more likely to click back to the original site if they are reading “partial” feeds than if they are reading “full” feeds.

This is the latest finding by Feedburner, a distributor of ads within RSS feeds (see the blog post by Rick Klau, Feedburner’s VP of Publishing Services). And it has sparked quite a debate, over at John Battelle’s blog.

The finding is significant because it contradicts the widely held assumption held by publishers. If publishers offer a partial feed — that is, a feed carrying only one paragraph or so of every article, with links at the bottom of each article pointing back to the site — the assumption has been this will drive readers to click back to the site in to read the rest of the article. And if readers click back to the site, they’ll see more advertising, and the site will be able to make money.

Until now, publishers offering full feeds, or the full text of every post with no link back to the site, have been assumed to be leaving ad revenue on the table: Readers never go to the site.

Feedburner tells us, however, that many other readers actually prefer going to the site, because they see Flash and other video or image content that they don’t get through RSS.

Here is what Rick at Feedburner had to say:

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).

But possibly the most compelling reason to provide full content is to make sure people who have trouble getting to the website can still read the posts:

I know a lot of bloggers like to post excerpts to their posts so people will click through to their blog and see their beautiful design and peruse their sidebar widgets — but if you are blogging on a service like wordpress.com — and that reader is inside of China, they aren’t going to be able to see your genius in its full glory, only through an aggregator.

So go full text (Derek Slater, I can’t read your post linking to me) and be assured that there is a way to get past the Great FireWall via an aggregator. (Wikipedia is another matter altogether). An excerpted post is just a tease.

This all makes sense, but the proof is in the pudding. The feed for Angry in the Great White North will now offer full content. It may take some time for the changes to filter out, so be patient. I'll be watching my traffic, my subscription rate, and also feedback from you, my readers. Let me know what you think.