People subscribing to the RSS feeds of VentureBeat or other blogs are no more likely to click back to the original site if they are reading “partial” feeds than if they are reading “full” feeds.
This is the latest finding by Feedburner, a distributor of ads within RSS feeds (see the blog post by Rick Klau, Feedburner’s VP of Publishing Services). And it has sparked quite a debate, over at John Battelle’s blog.
The finding is significant because it contradicts the widely held assumption held by publishers. If publishers offer a partial feed — that is, a feed carrying only one paragraph or so of every article, with links at the bottom of each article pointing back to the site — the assumption has been this will drive readers to click back to the site in to read the rest of the article. And if readers click back to the site, they’ll see more advertising, and the site will be able to make money.
Until now, publishers offering full feeds, or the full text of every post with no link back to the site, have been assumed to be leaving ad revenue on the table: Readers never go to the site.
Feedburner tells us, however, that many other readers actually prefer going to the site, because they see Flash and other video or image content that they don’t get through RSS.
However, for the RSS readers, or the readers that we can’t force back to the site, we’ll have to rely on advertising within RSS feeds, which remains frustratingly backward. Because of the standards used for RSS when it was created — specifically designed as a stripped down form — RSS does not allow for the insertion of Flash or Javascript-based ads.
However, the finding doesn’t really change anything for VentureBeat because we’ve always offered full feeds (except, of course, if you’re RSS reader only takes partial feeds, in which case the full feed is converted to partial). We’d often wondered how much money we were giving up by doing by offering full feed, and this finding suggests we aren’t giving up anything at all. For more on this, check out Battelle’s blog post. He’s threatening to offer a partial feed, to test the finding — and several readers have retaliated by unsubscribing..
RSS feeds are a conundrum for other reasons. This morning, I had a meeting with Flurry, one of dozens of companies that offer mobile-phone users a way to subscribe to RSS feeds like VentureBeat’s. Turns out, Flurry’s service isn’t yet able to distribute the few ads that we do carry in our feeds (i.e., served up via an arrangement with Feedburner). Flurry is working on a way to carry ads in feeds.
Tags: co:Feedburner, people:John-Battelle, RSS13 Comments
-
Jay said:
True, but I am more likely to unsubscribe. I don’t have time to click on every feed. I only subscribe to feeds that give me all the information. If you are blogging to make money. The blog will get more readers if the full feed is made available.
-
Enrique said:
I get partial rss feed. I am enjoy it because I don’t get my e-mail box full of e-mails from different blogs.
If I see an article I want to read more about, I just click on that particle article. -
Neeraj Kumar said:
It’s no debate for me. In my view almost 80% of the popular blogs have full feeds (gigaom, techcrunc, mashable are some of them).
If I find that the author is providing partial feed only to get extra clicks then I just unsubscribe. Only in rare cases it is justified.
-
Louis Gray said:
I believe the argument comes down to the goals of the site or blog. If the goal is to achieve widest dissemination of content, then full RSS feeds are perfect. An RSS reader is as good (or better) as a Web site visitor. If instead, you’re for profit, and clicks are the goal, then you want the site visitor instead. As I’ve written previously, one of the biggest things missing from RSS is context and community. You don’t always know who’s commenting on what and what it is they are saying, straight from the feed.
I strongly prefer full feeds as a consumer and as a publisher, but I’m not in the pennies for clicks and views game.
-
Joseph A. di Paolantonio said:
The primary reason that I click through to the web site from a feed, is to read comments or leave one… As now. Full articles are much more likely to draw me into the conversation.
I generally don’t subscribe to partial feeds.
BTW, feeds can contain enclosures. That being said, the day an article opens in my feed reader [RSSowl] and automatically launches some flash spam with sound at full blast, will be the day that I’ll have a new reason to unsubscribe from that commercialized feed.
-
Rick Klau said:
Matt - Thanks for picking up the conversation. Wanted to clarify one point. You wrote:
“Feedburner tells us, however, that many other readers actually prefer going to the site, because they see Flash and other video or image content that they don’t get through RSS.”
I don’t think I made that point in the post you pointed to, and while it may well be true, our efforts at inferring subscriber intentions have so far been met with limited success. Which is to say, we don’t know. But my own beliefs are that, as mentioned in the post, additional opportunities to click - not just a click on the item - almost always will increase clickthroughs, and more importantly, will drive additional exposure for your content. (I’m thinking here about Digg, del.icio.us or Technorati FeedFlares as examples.)
Looking forward to continuing the conversation, and as we have additional info to share that will shed additional light, we’ll make sure to let you know.
-
Andy said:
When faced with two similar feeds, and one is full text and the other just headlines, the choice is easy. That’s why your own VentureBeat Jobs feed doesn’t cut it (compare to TechCrunch’s CrunchBoard feed).
-
Nick said:
Full text over partial, in terms of user experience. It’s just frustrating that some sites choose to do partial feeds.
-
Gal Josefsberg said:
Thank you for this article. I just changed my blog’s settings to full feed :)
-
Graham said:
Of course FeedBurner is going to come to that determination, because they are profiting off your decision to give full RSS privlages rather than just partial.
There is no question that full RSS hurts the long-term viability of blogs. In the short-term it is good because it may entice more readers to read a submission and become engaged, but in the long-term blogs will need unique visitors and subscribers directly to their own site to remain viable.
I like partial feed because it gives me the ability to know whether I want to read something in the smallest possible space (i.e. 1 headline)… if it is interesting enough for me to read then i don’t mind clicking through.
-
matthew said:
trying to monetize your feed is pretty much a useless endeavor. rss ads generate negligable revenue and, as the quote above confirms, partial feeds do not drive folks back to the site.
giving away your content via a full feed is basically giving away your content for free. that’s exactly what rss was designed for. if your site is ad-supported, and you’re worried about lost revenue due to rss, don’t have an rss feed.
-
Sean said:
As a clarification about Flurry, we do show the ads attached to a feed like VentureBeat (the banner ad is available as an attachment). However, the ad is not effective since you can’t click through to the destination page.
We plan to offer content providers the option to insert mobile-targeted ads into their feeds within Flurry in the near future.
-
life insurance policy said:
Nice site and fine content
