But I think a full-text is the way to go. Listen .. Right now I have about 350 RSS feeds and search topics in my ‘bloglines’ and in June I was overzealous and had about 650 feeds. I’m sure I deleted a lot of quality feeds, that just didn’t have a ‘catchy’ first paragraph and didn’t catch my eye. I’m still sorting the type of feeds that I have been getting and unsubscribing feeds daily … but I tell you one thing ..

I have NEVER clicked on an add in a RSS feed in my blogline feeds … do you ? My goal is traffic comes and stays on my sites and searches topics and reads sections and hopefully I will get some adsense clicking … right now, I get nothing.

I wish that people who do offer partial text in their feeds would make meaningful summaries about what the post is about rather than putting in x number of words.

Anyway, I care more about making my reader’s life easy than forcing them to go to my blog to read a post.

Sure I may miss out on a couple of hits, but it’s alright.
And as far as missing out on revenue, I figure that most of the people who read my feed are regular readers and regular readers don’t really click on ads too much anyway.

On the flip-side, I’m looking at creating another blog that will run Google’s Adsense and/or other advertising tools. So this thought has crossed my mind as to whether or not I should use full or partial RSS feeds and if that will influence the potential ad traffic. My gut tells me to go with full feeds until something changes my mind (like Lindsay states).

http://www.feedblog.org/2005/08/google_adsense_.html

The interesting thing is that Adsense is suggesting full content.

Anyway my thoughts agree with most of the previous posts. It’s been said already but it would advantageous to cater for different types of reader, Russell Beattie has this system and it works well (for the reader anyway).

Interesting post from commentor no. 6 (Laura Moncur) regarding the mailing list to encourage word-of-mouth website promotion. The method could be implemented for rss feeds at somepoint available through a built-in feature for rss readers, web browser and (or) the website itself. Basically it would allow a user to send a link to a friend, along with the original website link.

There is a solution built into IE for sending a link but it only sends the active address link, not the link you are eyeballing.

Final thoughts … I obviously like full feeds better but the incentive for me to go to your web page is 2 things 1) Good content. 2) Interesting comments.

This creates a good relationship with the blogs we feature while giving our users a better experience…it’s much easier to scan the stories when they’re all basically the same size.

Jeff

Instead, our readership went up. It wasn’t exponential, but our following grew slowly because people would email the quotes to their friends and then their friends would hit our site. Word of Mouth is far more important in revenue generation than worrying about “giving away” your work.

I suspect the same is true for RSS feeds. We use full feeds and our following keeps growing. Stop worrying about the nuts and bolts and concentrate on the content.