Comments on: RSS Feeds: Full posts or extracts?

By: Tim Yang’s Geek Blog » Truncated RSS feeds do not make sense for Adsense

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 08:23:05 +0000

[...] One of the main arguments for truncated RSS feeds is that excerpted feeds drive traffic to your blog, assuming the visitors will click on your ads. But these visitors, according to Google Adsense, won’t do that. In fact, they probably lower your adclick ratio when they drive up your adviews without clicking on the ads. [...]

By: Alexander Barbara

Alexander Barbara — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 12:35:18 +0000

I have always posted full posts in my feed. The reason I did this was, from the outset, the friend that got me into blogging said that he wouldn’t read my feed unless I posted the full article. I use bloglines and hate having to click through to read the whole article.

But now, as I am trying to monetize my blog and see 30-50+ people that read the feed but don’t go on the site every day, I am wondering if I made the wrong decision.

By: Angsuman Chakraborty

Angsuman Chakraborty — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 02:10:51 +0000

Feeds are supposed to be extracts. Often I publish multi-page posts. If someone, including myself, have to look them using a RSS reader, it would be plain torture. Suppose he doesn’t like the post. Then with readers such as Awasu, he would have really long scrolling to do before he gets to the next post.
OTOH I do not like extracts which is just a copy of the subject and no more. They should have interesting content to draw the attention.

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 20:34:23 +0000

each to their own I guess melinama.

In terms of the ‘more’ feature – I don’t use it to get more page impressions but because I don’t want long long posts viewable on the front page of my blog. I’d rather keep my front and category pages to a manageable length. I guess this is because I tend to ramble on in my articles.

By: Melinama

Melinama — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:13:33 +0000

Another comment … even as a rank newbie I was aware that concealing part of a post behind a “more…” link was a way to increase page hits. As a reader I resent it and generally not follow the links.

By: Melinama

Melinama — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:10:12 +0000

I like having the whole feed to read – especially in the case of the sites which are so tarted up with ads and things that blink – so I offer the whole feed. That’s fair.

By: Personal Finance Blog

Personal Finance Blog — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the post. I only publish excerpts. Yes, loss of revenue stream and fear for content hijacking are the key concerns.

By: BobbyMasteria

BobbyMasteria — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My blog’s entries have a body and sometimes and extended field.
I syndicate the body, not the extended.
Thus my feed’s entries are sometimes not full.
If visitors are interested they go read the extended text on the blog.
I prefer reading an article in my browser rather than in my aggregator’s browser.
I have AdSense on my blog and I do want to earn money this way.
Once, I saw ads in a feed and hated that.

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

As a reader, I like the excerpts. If the article looks interesting, I open it up in a new window anyway, since I see some value in looking at the site as a whole, and reading a nicely formatted entry.

I use Feed On Feeds to read, so I get one huge page of all the new items since I last checked. I go through the list, opening new windows/tabs for anything that looks interesting.

Sean

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Extracts only… get people to visit you site (and see your ads etc.) otherwise they are effectivly stealing from you.