Are Full Feeds Evil?

Good news everyone! Since Blogsolid launched in August, the number of RSS subscribers has steadily been growing. October has seen the subscribership pass the 200 mark. This is a humble achievement, but as we all know, growing your subscriber-base is important for any blog. Subscriber figures are an indication of how many (or few) loyal readers you have.

An interesting observation is that as the subscriber count for Blogsolid has been growing, visits to the site have been on the decline. During the past week, visitor numbers have been lower than subscriber numbers every day – on some quieter days up to 50% less! So what has caused this shift?

I believe that the answer lies in the fact that Blogsolid offers full feeds.

Blogs usually offer RSS feeds in one of three different ways:

• Full Feeds
  Each article appears in its entirety.
• Partial Feeds
  Only post titles appear. Sometimes these are accompanied by a short excerpt from the article.
• Choice
  Offer both and let your readers decide which feed they prefer.

Full feeds vs. partial feeds has long been a popular discussion among bloggers. A recent poll by ProBlogger reveals that the overwhelming majority of participating bloggers support full feeds, yet in reading comments it is interesting to note that some people claim to prefer partial feeds.

Let’s take a quick look at some pros and cons of full feeds:

Good

• Full feeds grow your subscriber base.
  • DailyBlogTips quotes Matt Cutts of Google saying full text RSS gets more loyal readers.
  • Darren Rowse of ProBlogger says:
    

    The debate over full versus partial feeds rages on but my own findings having made the switch to full feeds here at ProBlogger is that my subscriber numbers went up significantly in the weeks after giving my readers my full posts.

• Full feeds are convenient to read on mobile devices.
• TechDirt argues that Full feeds offer complete information that can be scanned, read and understood without having to “read more”.
• This creates an opportunity for further reach since a reader may forward it to a friend or post it on a social network.
• It is possible to monetise full feeds effectively through advertising.

Bad

• Fewer visitors to your site. Subscribers can read your blog content in feed aggregators without ever visiting your website
• Full feeds are susceptible to content scraping.
• Although full feeds offer complete content, readers have to scan an entire article to see if they are interested in reading it instead of being offered a short excerpt summarising the post.
• Full feeds can do some funny things to layout elements such as yourpictures and pullquotes.

As a designer, I have come to the conclusion that full feeds are the devil! Although content is king, I believe the design of a site is very important because it creates a visual context adding value to content. Content is robbed of the website’s context when read in a sterile black-on-white feedreader and so, runs the risk of losing value and impact.

So, where to from here? Two possibilities come to mind: switch to partial feeds and regain site visitors or keep the full feeds and grow the subscriber base…