Full Feeds, Partial Feeds and Advertising

Posted in Blog, September 18, 2007 | 18 comments

Update: I have finally managed to find the time to add a full feed option to the main feed used here (the "Everything" feed). This is now available in either full or partial, at your discretion. No advertising in either feed. Thanks for all the feedback!

A short while ago, the Freakonomics blog moved to a new home at the New York Times. The responses to post announcing the change were almost exclusively complaints about the feed having changed to a partial feed.

The anger of some of the commenters was (is) astounding. A quick example - one comment ended simply "It was fun. Goodbye.". The overwhelming sentiment appears to be that partial feeds are the work of the internet devil, to be tossed aside as quickly as possible in favour of full-text feeds.

Are full feeds really better? Personally, I like partial feeds - I keep up with a lot of sites and the title and description of a post are what I use to decide if I'll read more. As I go through each folder in Bloglines, I'll open tabs in the background with items I'm interested in and read them afterwards. I click through even if the post is full-feed, and not out of some mis-placed desire to ensure the site gets every advertising impression, but because I'm not at the consumption stage of my reading yet - I'm still just deciding what to read when I'm using my feed reader.

Other people appear to only use the feed reader, never really clicking through. Mobile users, especially, appear to much prefer full feeds.

From a purely selfish perspective, the feed on this site includes no advertising so I serve a partial feed for articles (blog is usually full feed except for large posts). Readership is more important than revenue though, so if full feeds are more likely to attract and keep readers, I'm more than happy to change.

So I have a few questions:

Do you prefer full or partial feeds, and to what extent? Or do you prefer feeds that include both and give you the option of viewing either?
Do you usually click through to a site if you're reading a post? And do you comment more, less or the same on links from partial feeds than full feeds?
Would you be more likely to ubsubscribe from a feed with advertising in it?
~~Are full feeds more likely to encourage plagiarism?~~ Never mind - this is a topic for another day.
And finally, would you like full feeds for everything here?

Syndication

If you like this post, subscribe to my full feed or partial feed.

18 comments (Add Yours)

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Matthias O.

Unknown #1: August 9, 2007

1. I prefer full. But no problem with partial if and only if partial text are expressive of the rest of the content (Some blog keep the 100 firth letters of the post and that all).

2. Yes if I want write a comment. More on the partial feed (logic). I also open tabs in the background before reading full text.

3. Absolutely no

4. No idea

5. As you say : full feed except for large posts

Excuse me for my bad English speaking. I did what I could ;)

Marc Ruhwedell

Denmark #2: August 9, 2007

1) Most of the sites I have in my feedreader are partial feeds. Have have nothing against partial feeds except like you said: the title and description is just an appetizer, but most sites don't know how to write good appetizer and therefore I prefer the whole post to conclude weather or not it is something I might want to read. So I would prefer the option or full feeds.

2.1) Do you usually click through to a site if you're reading a post? - No.
2.2) And do you comment more, less or the same on links from partial feeds than full feeds? - The same maybe more.

3) No.

4) No idea.

5) Read statement #1 =)

Julian Schrader

Germany #3: August 9, 2007

Whether a site offers a partial or a full feed doesn't matter.

I skim through the feeds in NetNewsWire and open new posts in tabs for later reading.

Daniel

Austria #4: August 10, 2007

1. Definitely full feeds. It's just faster to read something in your feed reader, then waiting for the site to load. Loading times are nice here, but some sites are so overloaded with crap that it takes ages to load the page. If there is a full feed, you load it once and read it all.

2. Comments where comments are needed. I use a sage, Firefox add-on, as my feed reader, so the comments are just a tab ahead.

3. Ads... Well, since sage is Firefox based, Adblock Plus removes image ads. There are some sites with text ads embedded in the feeds, but thats uncommon. I wouldn't unsubscribe from a feed with ads, but I prefer feeds (and websites) adfree.

4. It's fine as it is.

james

Netherlands #5: August 10, 2007

partial feeds! i only want the title and if it's interesting enough i'll check out the site. i rather check the site where someone did his best to create a readable layout than reading a uniformous designed article. it does something with the content, reading it on a certain site. without the sitedesign around it it feels just 'broken'.

Adrian Lee

United Kingdom #6: August 10, 2007

1. I prefer full, but I'm less militant about it these days.

2. Whether I click through depends, if it seems like a long post, and I don't have time to read it all right then, I'll either mark it to keep new in Bloglines, or open it in a new background tab. Don't think it affects my commenting.

3. Yes, but only if the advertising was at a level that got quite annoying. Have seen one or 2 feeds that got excessive with it, big ads every post, that kind of thing. If it's like one ad banner every 5 posts or something (on a busy feed) then I'm not going to worry too much.

5. Not fussed, you're posts are usually worth opening in a seperate tab :)

Dave Child

United Kingdom #7: August 10, 2007

Thanks for the response so far, everyone :)

Seems that serving feeds with both partial content (without ads) and full content (with non-excessive advertising) is maybe the way to go. I'm a big believer in giving the user the choice, so it probably makes sense to do that with feeds just like with everything else! I shall get to work!

I'm not surprised about the answers to number 2 - I didn't think it would make much of a difference. if you've got something to say, you've got something to say.

Dave Child

United Kingdom #8: August 11, 2007

There's a great discussion of this topic at http://mondaybynoon.com/2006/09/04/partial-versus-full-rss-feeds/ - well worth a look. I especially like the analogy about cooking from Natalie Jost:

"I’m not going to cook you dinner and deliver it to your house. It defeats the purpose of that friendly conversation and relationship that is so necessary between a website owner and his/her users. Unless all you want is my food, which is kind of mooching, right?"

An interesting way of looking at it!

Thomas

Unknown #9: August 13, 2007

Personally, I like the partial. I like to see what the title is and maybe a few lines, if it peaks my interest I'll click through. Extensive posts just clutters what I have to scroll through and to be honest, too many of those and I drop the feed, wastes too much time.

I'm not worried about too much advertising and load times, the majority of us have broadband and I have a heightened sense of "ad-ignoring" anyways...;-)

What I might find interesting would be a tweaked feed that includes the number of comments in the title of the article as well, that way not only does it peak my interest, it offers another reason to click through. If I read the title and the summary and it's not that compelling, but I notice there are 100 comments, I might just be motivated to click through.

Ultimately, there should probably be two options, full and partial for those that like either...too many choices, too many selections...lol. Oh well.

Phil J Leitch

United States #10: August 16, 2007

1. Definitely prefer full feeds mainly to keep my reading streamlined. Hardcore NetNewsWire user and I prefer to do all my reading right there with as few clicks as possible. I almost always unsubscribe from partial feeds...unless it is really, really, really good.
2. If I want to commment I'll click through, but I never click through to read a post since about 97% of my feeds are full feeds, no reason to click through.
3. Nope, not at all. Advertise away. I don't even block ads via any software. People need to support what they do. No problem at all with ads. If that is all it takes to get me a full feed then please, hit me with the ads.
5. Yes, please.

United States #11: August 19, 2007

It's all about partial feeds for me.

jesus2099

France #12: August 22, 2007

1.
I prefer full feeds. I use either feedreader only for feeds I bookmarked, either I don't use it at all and just browse the web.

2.
I just click through if I want to comment. I am more likely to comment a full feed because I'll read it…

3.
I unsubscribe RIGHT AWAY from anything containing ads.

4.
People who want to copy, just copy whatever the mean.

5.
For me full feed is only important only for blogs, including large posts.

Dave Child

United Kingdom #13: August 27, 2007

Thanks for the the responses! Looks like the issue is pretty divided ...

I've been trying to find a way to offer the choice between full and partial in the same feed but that doesn't seem possible. Which is annoying. Having separate feeds might be the only way to allow people the choice.

Sam

United Kingdom #14: August 27, 2007

I highly prefer full feeds. I do not like to get half post, in case the post is interesting, I would like to keep reading without 1 second interruption.

Sam

[Apologies Sam - your comment was flagged as spam and I spotted it was genuine as I hit "delete" - too trigger happy today. At least I noticed before it vanished forever! - Dave]

Dave Child

United Kingdom #15: September 18, 2007

Please see the update at the start of the post - full feed is available for the "everything" feed. I'll see how that goes and if it is popular will extend that so all feeds are either full or partial.

David

Unknown #16: September 20, 2007

1) I prefer partial feeds (and partial front page posts for that matter).

But ONLY if the partial feed isn't someones sad attempt at substr($text, 100, 0). I want a REAL intro to the post - not the first 100 chars. If you give me some useless partial intro - then forget it - your just wasting my time.

2) I like to go through lists of topics fast and only "new tab" the links I like. So making me read the WHOLE post in a RSS feed is a bummer. Plus if I open the topics page I will comment if I read the whole post.

Kaps

Unknown #17: September 22, 2007

Well I prefer partial feeds. As said earlier I also read the title is and a few lines. If I like it I go further.

Canada #18: January 2, 2008

I like the partial feed, it looks great when I add it to my Google reader and display it on Google IG.