Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors
Monday, April 23rd, 2007;
-- Jordan McCollum |
Conventional wisdom tells us that if you publish partial feeds, people will click through to your site to read the rest of your story. The truth is that it just doesn’t work out that way. FeedBurner’s VP of Publishing Services, FeedBurner’s Rick Klau, noted last week:
First of all, I think the primary justification often given for partial feeds—that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher’s site—is off-base. As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption oriented, not transactionally focused. We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.
Rick and Muhammad Saleem on Pronet Advertising also note some reasons why bloggers are reluctant to publish full feeds, as well as some strategies to overcome the potential problems of scraping (and wanting people to come to your site and click on your ads).
Marketing Pilgrim is ahead of the curve. Andy switched to full feeds well over a year ago. He mentioned it in December, after full feeds received some coverage at SES Chicago. Andy also referenced Amit Agarwal’s success with full feeds—more than 1000 new subscribers in one month.
Speaking from my own experience, I am among the many who dislike partial feeds.
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April 23rd, 2007 at 10:43 pm
The main downside with full feeds is spammers stealing your content, but I think the positives far outweigh this.
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Yeah, of course. Everyone says you can just police it and send DMCA letters, but really, if someone’s stealing your content, they’re not going to stop just because you threaten them with legal action—if you can even track them down.
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Full feeds FTW. I clicked through b/c the MP full feed has “by andy.beal@gmail (Andy Beal)” as the author and I thought Andy went third person on us, but alas a guest author.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:13 pm
@Evan - more than just a guest, it’s the infamous Jordan. I’ll have to see how to change the email listing for her posts.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 pm
‘Infamous,’ eh? Cue scene from The Three Amigos.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:22 pm
LOL - Jordan would you say we had a “plethora” of authors?
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Oh yes. Does that make you El Guapo?
April 24th, 2007 at 12:02 am
I though this was more of the three stooges than the three amigos
j/k
April 24th, 2007 at 2:05 am
Whenever I subscribe to a feed and find out that it only offers partial feeds I just unsubscribe most of the time. On the rare occasion that I do stay subscribed, I read far less of the content than I would if they had a full feed, since I am reluctant to click through. If you really want people to click through you should offer content that encourages discussion so that readers will click through to read responses and write their own comment as I just have.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:33 am
[…] One popular reasons given for using partial feeds as opposed to full feeds is that it increases website visitors. If you let people have your full feed they will just consume your content through a feed reader and never visit your site, so you have to offer just a partial feed so they will have to click through to your website and read your full post, right? … Wrong! Several recent posts say otherwise. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and find out it only offers a partial feed I unsubscribe immediately in almost all cases. On the rare occasion that I do stay subscribed I end up reading less of the content than I would have had they offered a full feed, simply because clicking through to a website is just an extra step that I am reluctant to take, because it takes me away from all the other good content in my feed reader provided by all the other blogs who let me subscribe to a full feed. There is a lot of good content out there and I am always looking for ways to sift through it all. By offering only a partial feed you are pretty much guaranteeing that I will place your content in the never return category. One exception to this is Aaron Wall’s SEOBook. He offers great content that I wouldn’t want to miss it, but his blog is the only exception. […]
April 24th, 2007 at 3:41 am
I agree. It will do you no good. Some readers don’t like the idea of giving them small details. Most of us want to know main idea right away.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:12 am
The biggest problem feeds have is that they are competing with other for a slice of your reader’s attention. I scan through so many posts a day that partial feeds just don’t work for me. I prefer to drop it and more on to something I can absorb more quickly.
Having a partial feed is the quickest way to get me to ubsubscribe to someone’s feed.
April 24th, 2007 at 5:21 am
I just use livebookmarks in Firefox for my feed tracking. If I see an interesting headline I’m likely to click right through to the blog in question.
Otherwise, I don’t use a “feed reeder” application.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:10 am
What if the writer partializes the feed at a critical must-keep-on-reading point? That’s what I try to do, anyway…
April 24th, 2007 at 8:39 am
@Dario - that works well for some. I hear that SEObook has success with just posting a summary of the post.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:44 am
I know http://quickonlinetips.com managed 10000 feed subscribers with partial feeds only! They recently switched to full feeds too. I guess it is how readers like your content. http://seroundtable.com and http://shoemoney.com also have lots of readers with partial feeds only.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
I also don’t like partial feed. I don’t like the suspence in finding out what it’s all about. It’s better if I know what it’s all about.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:29 am
[…] However, the benefits of full feeds outweigh the risks. Also note that many people publish excerpt feeds believing that more people will visit their site to read their full posts—but FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau says they’ve seen no evidence to support that. See Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors at Marketing Pilgrim for more on the subject. […]
April 26th, 2007 at 8:29 am
[…] Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors | Marketing Pilgrim (tags: content feeds rss partialfeeds syn) […]
May 8th, 2007 at 10:58 am
When I see a partial feed, I only click through to the full feed if it is someone I really want to read, or the article is so interesting I just can’t help myself, or if I want to read the comments. I do not automatically click through on every feed. That just wastes my time.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:06 am
[…] valuable time. As a reader, partial feeds are just about enough to make me unsubscribe to a feed. Partial feeds will not grow your readership, but full feeds […]
March 16th, 2008 at 4:27 am
[…] so they will have to click through to your website and read your full post, right? … Wrong! Several recent posts say otherwise, and so do I. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and find out it only offers […]
March 25th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
[…] posts—but FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau says they’ve seen no evidence to support that. See Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors at Marketing Pilgrim for more on the […]