I experimented last week with showing a short summary instead of full posts in my RSS feeds, but I’ve decided to bail on that approach and have restored the full view. Here’s how come:
RSS feeds are incredibly handy for readers but an irksome dilemma for publishers — from a blogger’s point of view, the RSS crowd is empty traffic: they never click on ads, they rarely participate in discussions; many seem like free-riders who can’t be bothered to visit the site you so studiously designed for their benefit. I figured: I’ll show them and force them to click on the links to my posts and enjoy watching my hit count get the boost it so justly deserved.
Guess what happened: Nada.
How come? Pretty basic, actually: The only way cutting your feed short works is if your readers have nothing else in their feed list. Once people get hooked on RSS reading, they develop huge lists of RSS feeds. If you truncate your feed, they just move on to somebody else’s.
Bottom line: A short feed annoys your readers and does not boost your hit count. Most blog feeds are created automatically so there’s little work for the blogger to keep them updated. And finally, a small knot of a blog’s most loyal readers are also total Web geeks who rely RSS to surf as many sites as possible. These are not the folks you want to piss off.
The days of the publisher dictating how his readers view his content are long gone and besides, it’s hard enough to attract an audience online; if you make it harder on your readers to enjoy your content, you’re just making it harder for yourself.
You have ads in your RSS feed in any case, don’t you Tom?
My preference is for you to post full feeds with or without ads. I almost never go to your site, that’s correct.
Rick: hardly anybody ever clicks on the feed ads, so I presume they wouldn’t click on the ads at my site anyway. I just wanted to see if there was any uptick in traffic if people were forced to click through to get the entire post. There wasn’t.
I think it was worth looking into. I know if I had asked for people’s feedback first, 99 percent would’ve been like you: “Just give me the whole feed.”
The goodwill you build by adapting to readers’ preferences should pay off in the long run, I figure.
Tom,
I like your site, and your content, although I don’t think that RSS readers are “like free-riders who can’t be bothered to visit the site you so studiously designed for their benefit”. I only consume content via RSS feeds. Why? Because most content these days isn’t original anyway, it’s just a repost or a rehash from some other source. RSS feeds allow me to grep through information quickly and get through all the crap to the meat and potatoes of the content. All too often, I feel like bloggers/tweets/social media people, think that readers owe them a peak at their ads. Unless you create original, interesting content, don’t expect to get my eyes.
All that being said, I think you do a wonderful job creating content, and I don’t mind clicking through to your site.
Just my .02 cents.
Robert: I appreciate the feedback … that is an excellent summation of how and why people use RSS feeds.
I try to provide original content, but another legitimate use of a blog is to link to stuff others may not have heard about. In the long run, though, original content keeps people coming back.
I use RSS feeds (Google Reader) as a huge time saver for finding blog posts. One click and I see all the posts from the 14 blogs I follow. Otherwise I don’t know when they post. More often than not, I do go over to the blog for the improved layout and photos, plus full comment access.