Every now and then I see discussions about blogs and whether publishers should show full content, partial content or titles only in their RSS feeds. As someone who uses Google Reader I’ll tell you right now that I would prefer to see your full text in your RSS feed.
- Remember Steve Krug’s website usability book Don’t Make Me Think? Well, don’t make me click! When you publish your full feed you are making your content user friendly. When you don’t you are making me, the reader, work harder.
- I know you want me to visit your website so you can get more ad impressions and perhaps an ad click or two. Trust me, if I find what you write compelling I will visit your site to read the comments or post a comment myself. I want to be enticed to your site by good content, not dragged.
- I subscribe to new blogs and unsubscribe from blogs in my Reader account all the time. The most common reason I will unsubscribe from your feed is because I have been disappointed too often when I read a great title or promising paragraph in Google Reader then made the effort to come visit your blog and read the whole story only to be under whelmed. I am much more forgiving and tolerant when I can easily move to the next post in Google Reader.
- Remember why Yahoo! and so many other portals bombed back in the day? Because they were afraid of linking-out and having their users visit other web sites. When you force me to visit your web site in order to read your content you are behaving the same way, only in reverse.
- I understand that you may be worried about scrapers and people using your feed in an unscrupulous manner. I feel for you, really. But that does not mean that I should have to be the one to pay the price via inconvenience. After all, I’m the one who wants to read your content for the right reasons. Don’t make it harder for me.
Our community promotes concepts like usability and being customer centric all the time. We work hard to provide our customers a good experience. Should your RSS/feeds be the exception because your content is being read away from your domain? To me that attitude seem antithetical to the marketing mindset.
What about you?
- If you publish via RSS why do you distribute either full or partial content in your feed?
- As a reader why do you think RSS publishers ought to provide full content in their feeds or why do you think that partial content is good too?
