Apparently, Partial Feeds Are a Reason Not to Read Your Blog
I know that I personally prefer when a blog’s homepage show a full article rather than summaries where you must click to read more. The question crossed my mind a week or so ago if others shared my like of full feeds or if readers would prefer a partial feed.
Apparently people have strong opinions about partial feeds similar to a passionate Ford owner’s dislike of Chevy’s.
Invesp, who is willing giving away $400 to a random RSS subscriber, is receiving a consistent complaint about the fact that their blog is a partial feed.
Khalid from Invesp links to a post from Graywolf where he says, “If you’re an SEO blogger and you publish a partial feed I’m putting you on notice, August 1st I’m dropping you from my RSS reader.†Graywolf goes on to explain his reasons in this post.
Of course not everyone hates them. Commenter Richard Dows says that he prefers the partial feed because he uses his RSS reader to skim. However, this type of headline only reading could cost a blog owner important opportunities to engage with readers. Of course readers are going to skim, but when they only have headlines to skim, they miss subheadings that might catch their attention and calls to engage in discussion like the one below.
What do You Think?
What is your opinion on partial feeds? Are you more likely to read them or just skim through the summaries and never become engaged? Does your blog have a partial feed? If so, have you received any feedback from readers?
I prefer to have the full feed and I offer a full feed because I know that the blogosphere in general is passionate about people offering full feeds. If your users demand it, why not give them what they want? I haven’t found it to impact my blog negatively yet.
I definitely like the full article on the home page in most cases. For the feed I don’t really care. I don’t mind clicking through to the site if it is an article that I want to read.
Seems like Google Reader and bloglines should have a full partial option then you don’t have to worry about.
I hate partial feeds. Although I read at Dosh Dosh about a plugin which allows you to read full feeds through google reader. Problem is I have bloglines and am used to it. I need to figure out how I can easily transfer all the feeds over to google reader.
I like for blog homepages to have the entire articles. RSS feeds I do not care. As a reader, I don’t care - as a blog owner, I prefer partial feeds to increase site traffic, etc
One of my blogs is advertising supported, so I set the RSS feed to partial, which will increase my advertising impressions.
i agree with erik. i’m all about the full article. i subscribe to the blog for one reason: to get information. as a subscriber, chances are i’m not just cruising through or skimming. plus, if the author is decent at giving accurate titles to each post, i can tell almost immediately if i’m interested enough to read or pass.
Yep. Partial feeds are annoying. I usually don’t stay subscribed with blogs offering partial feeds unless their content is exceptionally great.
Currently I think I am only subcscribed to one feed that isn’t offering full content.
So, I’d say it’s a bad idea not to give your loyal subscribers the whole article but force them to click on the “More…” link every time they read your posts. After all, isn’t more subscribers what we all are after - so why would we punish the ones who decide to get our feed?
I’m with the majority on this. I dislike partial feeds as a reader. The “partial” visible has to be so very enticing to get me to click to read more so I think it is a big no-no as a publisher also.
If the objective is to cram your blog with syndicated info from other sites as part of a content / linking strategy then I can see the reason for it but for me it just doesn’t hack it. That said I’m guilty as charged on a few Squidoo lenses!!
On my blog, I have partial articles and full articles on the homepage depending on their length. If the article will be fairly long, I write a short summary to display on the homepage with a “continue reading” link below the article. If the article is rather short, I go ahead and just post the full article on the homepage so that people don’t have to click “continue reading” simply for another paragraph of text.
I don’t have a problem with either partial or full articles on the actual site, I have no preference. But I do have a preference about feeds. Partial feeds suck, and I’ll drop you from my feed reader QUICK if you have a partial feed.
Christine,
This has been an interesting discussion. The main reason we had partial feeds was due to the limitation of the software we used to host our blog. After I discovered how much people hated partial feeds, I spent the weekend moving to wordpress.
Khalid
Often with partial feeds I’ll just end up skipping over the post altogether. This is mainly on a subconscious level…not just because the title does not appeal to me.
I’ll also get distracted by the following item’s title and move on.
Think about a magazine. Which part would you read? The tiny snippet at the side or the prominent article that grabs your attention with lots of subtitles, text and a glossy photo?
Hey Andy, you’re absolutely right - for me it’s so subconscious I hadn’t recognised I did it until I read your post. I’ve also noticed (ref magazines) that I have a real tendency NOT to finish reading the whole article getting distracted by images, other headlines etc as I lose interest in a piece if it’s not particularly captivating. That leads on to blogs and websites with loads of ads and graphics in sidebars etc - are they a distraction from articles? Is that a good thing if they are there to monetize the site? Very thought provoking post Andy, thanks.
Hey Wizzer, yeh the ads can be a real distraction. I find those blogs with two columns of widgets/ads are even tougher to concentrate on, especially if they use animated ads.
Which reminds me, why is it that so many affiliate programs insist on producing terrible flashing ads? It’s a lose-lose situation - people ignore the ads and it cheapens the publisher sites.
I have two blogs with the two columns - both focus on adsense revenue and affiliate sales rather than the content - and both perform OK ish. I must test by reducing one of them to one column. On a serious content blog - I agree totally - all the noise detracts from the message. Re affiliate ads - I’d like to think they flash because they’ve tested and they pull better but something tells me it’s because of a designers input!!
Methinks it’s designers input! As well as lack of knowledge about what modern web users respond to. I know a guy in charge or online marketing and e-commerce for a major brand, and he sadly has little idea.
A lot of the corporates really are behind the times…if they read John Chow they’d know smartly placed text ads work best!
I’d better not start on my thoughts about corporate “marketing” - suffice to say if most reasonable bloggers had a tiny fraction of their budgets the results would speak for themselves!