Since then I’ve chatted to one of the team at Google about the integration and asked if I could see them in the wild somewhere. They shot me a link to this RSS feed where you can view them in Google Reader on each post.

Interestingly in this feed I’m seeing a real variety of ads (both in terms of advertisers and types of as) including:

So we’re seeing text ads, image ads and at least two sizes.

A little concerning is that the relevancy of the ads are not that contextual as far as I can see. The feed is from a music blog. Some ads are matching - others don’t at all.

He also told me that they’re rolling these out to both existing Feedburner Ad Network publishers and AdSense publishers - a small group initially but it won’t take long for it to be opened up further.

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Here’s a comparison of my two blogs over 24 months:

You can also do comparisons based upon different periods of time (1, 3, 6, 12 and 24 months). One cool feature is that you don’t need to know the Feed URL of the blog to use it. You can just put the name in and in most cases it gets it right. I say ‘most’ cases because as I write this if you put ‘ProBlogger’ in you get a blog with 85 subscribers.

You can see that it picks up all fluctuations in subscriber numbers - the real ones as well as glitches (that massive spike was a day that most people had their numbers double). I don’t tend to get into these types of comparisons (I tend to focus on my own numbers more than others) but it’s probably something that we’ll see people enjoy using.

For fun - lets check out three of the big Web 2.0 blogs :

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Google bought Feedburner last year and so this has been talked about for a while now - but in the coming weeks they’ll begin to run AdSense in the feeds of those publishers who are a part of the Feedburner Ad Network. Initially it’ll be with a small group of publishers with a full launch for all Feedburner publishers ’soon’.

They write:

“Publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory.”

“For publishers who are not yet placing ads in their feeds, any publisher who meets the requirements to join the AdSense program will also be able to use AdSense for feeds. You will be able to manage your feed ad units directly from AdSense Setup tab, and track performance right on the AdSense Report tab.”

To be a part of AdSense for Feeds you’ll need to be signed up for AdSense and set up your channels for ‘placement targeting’.

If you’re not an AdSense publishers sign up here:

This is great news because to this point AdSense did have an option for advertising in feeds that was a closed beta test (something that has been closed and not really developed for years) and the Feedburner Ad Network was also not available for all publishers.

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This ad was seen on the feed of Inhabitat (found via Digital Inspiration). The images are served as image maps not JavaScript.

Here’s hoping that this will perform better than the previous AdSense for RSS program that has been in beta for a couple of years now!

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Whether to post excerpts or full feeds is something I’ve grappled with on and off for years now. I used on only do excerpts here on ProBlogger too but in the end decided to switch. The main thing that held me back from switching to full feeds on ProBlogger was the issue of duplicate content. I see a new blog scraping my content every day or two so there must be many sites with the same content as ProBlogger out there. This is frustrating and while I try to track down those who do so without any acknowledgement of source I can’t possibly stop them all.

The good thing now is that ProBlogger has authority in the eyes of Google as it’s been around for a few years and I’m pretty confident that Google ranks us as the original source of all the duplicate pages. I’m a little less confident of this with DPS so have kept it as an excerpt feed. Having said this - I’ll probably switch DPS to full feeds at sometime soonish as it’s got a fair ranking in Google now.

Further Reading on Full vs Partial RSS feeds:

• Full or Partial RSS Feeds - The Great Feed Debate
• Full or Partial Feeds - Poll Results

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Think you’ve heard it all before?

It’s true – if you want more subscribers, write great content and target a specific niche. It’s a lovely idea, and guess what? It really works.

But to understand why your readers subscribe (and how to hook more in), it helps to use some fun psychology. Read on and find out who’s really subscribing to your blog.

7 Dark Truths About Your Subscribers

If you’ve got subscribers, it’s likely that they belong in at least one of these categories:

1) They want to be you
If you subscribe to Problogger, the chances are high that you want what Darren’s got: a great full-time blogging job. There’s no shame in it, but before you move to Australia and buy black specs, consider this: your individuality is what makes you worth reading. (Besides, sheep look ridiculous wearing glasses.)

2) They want to be with you
There’s a well-known blog that became one of the most-read UK sites overnight due to the author’s profession: she was a London call girl. Thousands of viewers checked in to read about her candid antics. She never named names, but it still made for titillating reading.

3) They want your brain
Are your readers zombies? If you’re an expert in your niche, the chances are high that you’ve got subscribers for one reason: they’re marching to your beat and they want your brain. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it?

4) They want your goodies
Is your blog like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory? Are you always giving away prizes and links to free stuff? It’s a universally accepted truth: free sweeties equals followers.

5) They want your wit
Laughter is a powerful thing. Whenever a blogger makes me giggle again and again, I look for the subscribe button. Partly it’s because I like being drip-fed humour every day, but in truth I’m just jealous: I want their wit.

6) They want to stay ahead
Do you subscribe to your competitors’ blogs? You should do—it’s the best way to stay ahead. Chances are, a lot of your readers are your competitors. It’s how they keep abreast of what you’re planning and try to stay in front.

7) They want to check up on you

Last month my Mum told me that she’d subscribed to my blog. I had no idea! It didn’t worry me, but it certainly made me think. Suddenly you become very selective about what you say, and which life experiences you share. (Don’t worry – secretly they’ve done all the crazy things you have too.)

How To Get More Subscribers With The 7 Dark Truths

If you want more subscribers, just flip the 7 Dark Truths on their heads:

1) Become a superstar
If you work hard at becoming well-known in a certain field, people will want to be you and read you.

2) Become a heart-throb
If you write openly in a way that tugs on people’s heart strings, chances are they’ll want to hear from you again. It’s rare to find bloggers who spill their soul in a mature way that you can learn and grow from.

3) Become an expert
Seth Godin has the world’s most popular business blog for a reason: he’s the best in his niche. He’s also a superstar and he’s witty, so he attracts some of the other groups. If you can become a funny expert superstar too, your subscriber count will thank you.

4) Become generous
Think differently: as well as giving away prizes or links to free sites, what could you offer your readers for free that would be invaluable to them? Free website advice? Free marketing help? A free eBook? Whatever it is, make sure they have to subscribe to get it. Use the Feed Footer plugin for Wordpress to add the details at the end of your feeds.

5) Become funny
There’s a famous saying: you’re either runny or you’re snot. If you can make people laugh, they’ll be more inclined to grab your feed once they’ve dribbled giggled their way to the foot of your post.

6) Become a market-leader
The 37 Signals blog is one of the most popular in their niche. If you can make something that’s truly remarkable, there’s a good chance your competition will subscribe to see what you’re up to. Competitors equal subscribers. Having lots of both never sounded so good!

7) Tell your Mum
Tell your friends and family too. They’ll want to check up on you, and will become subscribers long before you’ve had the chance to delete your post about that “incident” with the hay barn and the matches.

Go forth and use your new knowledge to gain the subscribers you deserve!

Nick Cernis is the author of Put Things Off, the laid-back productivity blog that teaches freelancers, entrepreneurs and bloggers how to live the lives they love. Subscribe to his feed or visit PTO now.

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My logic is that people subscribe to blogs that they think will enhance their lives in some way in the future.

Many bloggers create a sense of anticipation on a blog quite instinctively - but there are numerous things that you can do quite intentionally to create anticipation and increase the chances of someone subscribing.

So how do you convince people that something that you’re yet to create is worth signing up for?

Today I want to share one effective strategy for building anticipation on a blog with some practical ideas on how to implement it. Like yesterday’s post - it’s not rocket science - but it is something that has worked for me.

Highlight Current and Past Quality Content

Probably the most convincing argument to a reader that you’ll write something that they can’t live without in the future is to have already written something that they have connected with.

Your current and past posts are your most effective advertisements for a continued relationship to those arriving on your blog.

As a result - one of the most effective strategies for creating anticipation on a blog is to put your best content in front of those visiting your blog - show them what you can do and let the quality of that work speak for itself.

Think back to to blogs that you’ve subscribed to lately - if you’re anything like me you’ve subscribed in most cases as a result of reading a post you thought was helpful, interesting, entertaining… etc

Most of us click the RSS feed icon or subscribe link based upon the quality of what we already read in the hope of seeing more of it.

So what’s the lesson here?

Actually there are two lessons - one is obvious and the other many fail to do.

1. The obvious one is to write great content and to do it regularly - its got to be your number 1 priority as a blogger.

2. The less obvious one is to put your best content into the view of those who are yet to subscribe to your blog - particularly first time visitors (who are crucial to target if your objective is to build the number of subscribers to your blog). Let me share a few ways you can do this.

How to Highlight Your Best Content

There are numerous ways to highlight your best content so and in doing so give people reason to subscribe to your feed.

1. Sneeze Pages - Perhaps the most useful technique that I can show you is to creating Sneeze Pages on your blog. I’ve recently done this on Digital Photography School. Look at the ‘Digital Photography Tips’ section in my sidebar (pictured left) - these links point to ’sneeze pages’ that highlight my best and most popular content.

In having these sneeze pages I not only increase my page views - but I show new readers to my blog just how much I’ve already covered and hopefully increase the sense of authority and credibility that I have.

The subscription rate from users hitting these sneeze pages is extremely high (note - I have prominent ways to subscribe on these sneeze pages and the pages that they link to).

2. ‘Best of’ Sections - Another is to create sections in your sidebar or front page that highlight your best work. One example of this is the ‘Best of ProBlogger’ section on my front page of this blog. This section is ‘hot’ - quite literally. Check out this heat map (taken a few months back using the CrazyEgg tool) of this section to see how many people click on it.

The benefits of this are numerous - but ultimately it’s about driving people to previously written quality content. My observations are that it’s these popular pages where many subscribers to my blog come from.

3. Landing Pages - Another strategy is to use a plugin like Landing Sites to sense when a reader is arriving on your blog for the first time and showing them other posts you’ve written on the topic they are searching for.

This works well - particularly if you have a large archive - because someone arriving on your blog not only sees one post on the topic that they’re looking for but numerous (increasing the perception that you’re a comprehensive source of information on that topic).

4. Interlink Posts - You should be regularly linking to your previous best quality posts in new posts. In doing this you constantly drive people to the pages where they see writing of a quality that is likely to convince them that you know what you’re talking about. The more pages that they view that they find useful the more chance of them subscribing.

But Wait There’s More

The key to the above four techniques is to send new readers to your highest quality and most helpful posts and then to present them with opportunity to subscribe on these posts (update: here’s my post with more tips on how to build anticipation on your blog).

However this highlighting content isn’t enough on it’s own.

It will definitely work to some degree but there are numerous other ways to create anticipation on a blog and to these I’ll be turning my attention tomorrow.

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This question hits my inbox so regularly that I that I’d answer it publicly rather than retyping my answer to each person who asks - it’s a topic that is on the mind of many bloggers these days so lets tackle it head on.

I’ve written an extended entry on this topic with 11 practical suggestions at Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for Your Blog - however there’s one ’secret’ that I’m increasingly convinced is a key to increasing subscriber numbers on a blog.

I say ’secret’ because it eluded me for years - although in the end it was staring me in the face.

This ’secret’ has helped me build both of my blogs into the 40,000 subscriber range (and beyond) and it’s something I see many other bloggers using to build their blogs - sometimes strategically and sometimes intuitively.

Today I want to introduce this secret and then over the next few days I want to follow it up with some practical tips on how to use it in practice.

At the hear of what I want to talk about is a simple question:

Why do People Subscribe to Feeds?

I am sure there are numerous reasons that people subscribe to a blogs feed - however in most cases they simple truth is that they subscribe for one obvious yet powerful reason:

they think that the blog might produce content that they’ll want to know about at some point in the future.

As I say - this is a simple (and very obvious) truth - but it is actually a secret to building RSS subscriber numbers and it’s worth repeating.

People will subscribe to your blog if they think that it will enhance their lives in some way in the foreseeable future.

Ponder that for a few moments before reading on…..

Perhaps instead of asking ‘how can I get people to subscribe to my blog’ a better question to ask is:

‘how can I convince people that I will write something tomorrow, next week or next month that they just can’t miss out on.’

This ’secret’ of building your subscriber numbers to your blog is to create a sense of anticipation in those who visit your blog. Build this and you’ll find people seek out ways to track with you rather than you having to find ways to shove your means of anticipation down their throats.

How to Create Anticipation on a Blog

My hypothesis is that creating a sense of anticipation among your readers increases the chances that they’ll subscribe to it.

But how do you do it?

This is where I create a little anticipation of my own and let you know that I’m going to unpack this further tomorrow when I’ll give you some practical tips on how to create anticipation on your blog. (update: here’s my next two posts in this series -how to build anticipation on your blog and more on how to build anticipation on your blog).

In the mean time - some questions for discussion:

• How do you build anticipation on your blog?
• How have you seen others do it effectively?

Feel free to share specific examples if you’ve got them.

Subscribe to my feed to get notified of my next post in this series.

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Today Bidvertiser started experimenting with just this.

I’m yet to try it for myself and there’s a distinct lack of information on the Bidvertiser site about this new development - but it’s good to see a new entry into the RSS advertising space.

From what I can piece together - the process of adding them to your site involves you verifying your feed and choosing a category for your blog/feed. If you give it a go let us know how it performs for you in comments below.

Update: I’m told by a contact at Bidvertiser that this will be officially announced later today. The process for getting involved is:

1. Join BidVertiser as a publisher (or login if you already are).
2. click the “Public Beta - BidVertiser ads for your RSS/ATOM feeds. Click here to start! ” link.
3. Type you feed URL
4. Verify your feed ownership by adding a unique code to your post
5. We will provide you with an alternate feed address that will include the ads
6. We will provide you with a “Subscribe” widget for quick subscription (there are detailed instruction of how to add it to each of the popular blog platforms).

The upside is that this is a potential way to earn an income from your RSS feed. The downside is that you need to promote a new RSS feed to your readers for them to see it (from what I can see). I can see this as being something of a barrier to many bloggers.

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While much of that depends on how many people read your feed in a given day, some of that is also people both subscribing and unsubscribing. If you could stop people unsubscribing, your subscriber count would always grow exponentially.

While a lot of emphasis is placed on getting more subscribers, it seems to me that keeping the ones you have is just as important.

What is the key reason why a person might unsubscribe? They’ll do so when your posts become clutter: when they stop reading your posts.

Darren has previously listed 34 reasons why readers unsubscribe from your blog. In fact, each of these reasons causes readers to stop reading your posts, which then causes them to unsubscribe.

The question this post seeks to answer is: how can I get subscribers to keep reading my posts?

As long as your subscribers are reading what you write, they’ll never unsubscribe.

Create a gripping headline

The ugly truth is that many feed readers make the decision to either skip or keep reading a post before their eyes have reached the end of the headline. There are plenty of great articles written about honing the ability to write headlines that draw readers into posts — articles every blogger should read. Here are a few of my favorites from Brian Clark and Leo Babauta:

• How to Write Headlines That Work
• Clear vs. Descriptive Headlines: Which Works Better?
• The Sexy Art of Writing Headlines That Kill
• 10 Sure-Fire Headline Templates That Work
• 7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates That Work

Headlines are your weapon in the constant battle for attention, so it’s crucial that you use them well. A simple hack I often use is to take the headline formula behind a popular article and adapt it to my own post.

Start with a knock-out opening sentence

Once your headline has done its work the subscriber will start with your first sentence. If you waffle, or go off-topic, or write in a bland way, the reader will drop out of your post.

In my experience, there are seven key routes to a gripping opening sentence:

• A tempting offer.
• An irresistible question.
• A curious connection.
• A controversial claim.
• An engaging anecdote.
• A problem.
• A tricky question.

I’ve covered each of these methods in detail here: Grip Your Readers With These 7 Knock-Out Opening Sentences.

Use consistent imagery at the beginning of your posts

If you hold a particular blog in very high standing you’ll be likely to stick with a post even if it starts with a fizzle rather than a bang. If readers knew who was behind a particular post they may well be more likely to read it.

I don’t think readers always do know, however. Most of us group feeds by folder or lump new content into one stream of news. If we make the decision to read or skip based on the headline alone, we may end up deciding not to read an article before we even know which blog it originated from.

One incredibly effective way to brand your posts is to use consistent imagery right at the start. Almost every single post at ProBlogger begins with a distinct image in a unique style. Even if you’re focusing on the headline, it’s impossible to miss that the post originates from ProBlogger (because the image is right below the headline).

Using consistent imagery at the top of your posts will instantly let subscribers know where the post originated from. Here are some strategies you can use to make your imagery unique:

• Use of images of a consistent type or style.
• If you write on them, try to use similar fonts.
• You could also use images of the same size and position.

This strategy is also effective in another way: images slow the eye down. We can scan text rapidly, but it’s a lot harder to scan an image.

Photo by Lost in Scotland.

Use interesting formatting in your own style

Give your posts texture – Your posts might look fantastic as they appear on your blog, but subscribers see them without any of the bells and whistles. Plain text without any formatting can be visually interesting when laid out on a vibrant page. Not so in a feed reader. If your posts are boring to look at it becomes easier than ever for subscribers to ignore them.

Sub-headings, bolded sentences, box-quotes and in-text links all help to add texture to your posts when they appear in a feed reader. Visually interesting posts will excite the eye and help draw readers into your posts.

Brand your posts with formatting – Developing your own formatting style, in combination with distinct imagery at the beginning of your posts, can ensure that it’s immediately obvious where your posts come from.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader right now, you’d probably agree that you recognize ProBlogger posts straight away. If a reader trusts that your blog provides good content then being recognizable is priceless.

Use short paragraphs

Big chunks of text aren’t inviting to a reader. Your blog might display your posts in a generously-sized and well-spaced font, but feed readers tend towards fonts that are small and narrowly spaced. It’s important to use paragraphs liberally to open up the text in your posts.

If your post is broken up into bite-sized chunks it becomes a lot easier to tackle. If your post looks easy to read a subscriber will be more likely to give it a chance.

Break up your text with images

Feed readers are also lacking when it comes to color and shape. A stream of text can become monotonous. You can help your posts stand out by breaking up the text with relevant images.

Always provide value

If you follow the above steps every post you publish should look unique when it appears in a feed reader. It will be immediately obvious that it came from your blog.

This will only be a positive, however, if the subscriber consistently finds value in everything you write. If that’s the case, she or he will probably stick with your post even if it comes with a snooze-inducing headline and a waffly opening sentence.

The essential point to understand is that, while the above tips will draw feed readers into your posts, the strategy will only be effective if your subscribers consistently feel rewarded when they do so.

A subscriber who is reading and appreciating your posts is more likely to link to you, comment, vote on social media and recommend you to friends. That’s something we all want.

Skellie is a regular writer for ProBlogger. You can subscribe to Skellie’s feed for more useful blogging advice.

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Some might think that subscribing to yourself is nothing more than an exercise in vanity - but I believe it’s good blogging practice and something that can improve your blog.

This morning I was wading through the thousands of unread items in Google Reader and noticed that one blog that I read regularly hadn’t updated in the week that I’d been away.

I thought this was unusual as it was a blog that usually posted at least a couple of times a day so I decided to visit the blog directly. When I arrived I found that the blog had been posting as normal (13 posts in the last week). It seemed that their RSS feed was not reporting new posts for some reason.

I emailed the blogger to let them know that I was having problems reading their feed and they replied with:

“I was wondering why my visitor stats were down by 60% this week!”

The blogger had been oblivious to their feed having problems and just blogged on as normal.

This is a great argument to subscribing to your own RSS feed.

I wrote a few weeks ago about having a Vanity Folder in your RSS feed but another folder that I would recommend all bloggers having is a ‘My Feeds’ folder.

I have a folder in Google Reader called ‘Mine’ (catchy name isn’t it!) which contains subscription to my own blogs feeds. Every day I quickly scan it to make sure that my posts are coming through. This way I’m immediately alerted to problems with my Feed and don’t have to wait for a week or two to notice that there haven’t been any posts coming through recently.

But Wait There’s More!

If the above reason isn’t good enough for you to subscribe to your own feeds - I’ve got another one for you (and no it’s not so that your feed subscriber numbers are boosted - although I’m sure many subscribe for that too).

The ‘Bonus’ reason to subscribe to your own feeds is that you can actually learn a lot about your own posting by scanning your own posts.

I’ve written a series on how to make your RSS feeds POP which talks about some of the techniques that you can use to make your RSS feed stand out from the crowd.

One of the best ways to hone these skills and make sure you are effectively using them is to subscribe to your own blog and see how your blog looks to your subscribers. I’ve learned so much about designing my posts by doing this.

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As we know FeedBurner counts can naturally fluctuate.

But what about when they fluctuate unnaturally? Can we find trends in our statistics? Interestingly, your FeedBurner stats can tell stories about your readers’ habits.

During the first few months of my first blog, I attempted to try and notice trends and patterns as seen below:

I immediately found 3 points of interest as highlighted on the chart.

1. Readers were most active at the beginning and end of work weeks
2. Weekend reading was minimal
3. A new pattern during a holiday week

After finding some patterns in the charts, I started to hypothesize what caused this pattern to occur. Was it my posting frequency? Was I posting on the wrong days? I started to think about my personal feed reading habits and was able to produce some reasoning.

1. Start and end of week was most active

Most bloggers have been told that Mondays tend to be the best day for readers. It is not hard to imagine your readers, spread out with their coffee mug plowing through weekend feeds. The opposite holds equally as true, readers want to digest all of their feeds before they leave for the weekend.

2. Minimal weekend reading

This will not surprise anyone; people are away from their computers and are doing very little reading. The consistency between Saturday and Sunday is caused from the web-based readers reporting in and the exclusion of the on-demand readers.

3. New holiday pattern

The inverted ‘U’ comes from a recent American holiday - July 4th. Iexpected numbers to be down this week, so low counts were not surprising. I expected Wednesday, July 4th to be the slowest day, instead the opposite held true and a number of readers returned. I will post these next holidays and anxiously await to see the trends during Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

There are many reasons why readers unsubscribe, but remembering that external human factors are involved can help you rationalize fluctuating counts and react accordingly.

This is a guest post by Max Pool, a software engineer by day - aspiring SEO expert by night. More ideas can be found at his blog codesqueeze.com.

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One of the nice features with this Top list is that they present a little graph (a “sparkline” - thanks Jorge of the feed (tiny and not really that specific - but handy at spotting a trend) and show it it’s been trending up or down.

Keep in mind that this is just tracking those who use Bloglines to read feeds. This does mean things are ordered a little different to other Top Blog lists.

Interestingly for me the Top 1000 list puts my blog Digital Photography School at #250 on the list - ahead of ProBlogger at #304 - despite ProBlogger having 4000 or so more subscribers. Obviously ProBlogger readers use Bloglines less than other methods.

Anyway - it’s an interesting metric (well for 10 or 15 minutes anyway).

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I’ve had about 10 emails in the last couple of hours from many asking if I’d noticed the difference - a massive slump in numbers.

I suspect it’s just a glitch in Feedburner’s system - or a glitch in one of the major News Aggregators reporting. It’s happened before and I don’t really think that there’s any reason to panic as it looks like it is something that has hit everyone with the chicklet (from what I can see it’s hitting people by between 40-50%).

Thanks to everyone for the heads up - David was first.

Update: looking over Feedburner stats it seems that it’s the ‘Google Feedfetcher’ stats that are not showing up.

Here are yesterday’s breakdown of stats for my Digital Photography School feed:

Here are the stats for today:

As you can see - it’s the Google Feedfetcher stats that are missing today. From memory this happened once before and was rectified the following day.

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Most of those analyzing the data don’t seem to be looking at multiple feeds.

For example - here at ProBlogger there are two main feeds that people have subscribed to - the original ProBlogger feed and the Feedburner one:

Andy picks up the ‘why’ and ‘how’ it could be useful to have these two figures in his post The Secret Statistics In Split RSS Feeds - Google Reader.

Matt Cutts points this out too and also reminds us that blog software like WordPress creates many feeds - including feeds for categories, comments etc.

Update: Pete Cashmore also makes a strong case for these sorts of numbers being compromised by ‘default feeds’ such as Google Readers ‘bundles’ which he says will inflate your figures by around 50,000 simply by being added to a bundle.

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The subscriber numbers can be seen simply by doing a search for a blog’s name after clicking the ‘Add Subscription’ link once you’ve logged into your Google Reader account.

Keep in mind that the numbers are not total subscriber numbers - just those subscribing via Google Reader (some are saying it could include other Google RSS subscribing services like iGoogle).

via Daily Blog Tips.

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In categories like news, technology, video, cars and photography (a total of 15 categories) they are bundling popular feeds with between 5 and 9 feeds in each category.

Taking a quick look through the bundled feeds there isn’t too many surprises in the feeds included - although I’d have thought that they probably could have found a few more feeds in most categories.

Being included in one of these bundles would mean a serious increase in subscriber count - I wonder who one has to sleep speak with at Google to get included in one of them! I can think of one useful addition to their photography bundle!

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This week we’re going to full up the Great Feed Debate that we ran on the blog this week and are asking:

Do You Use Full or Partial Feeds on Your Blogs? (or do you offer your readers a choice of both)

If you have more blogs than one - answer with what you do on the majority of your blogs.

PS: I’ll post the results of the last Poll shortly.

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• Google will work on a standard for feed publishers to tell aggegrators about changes in the feed
• The Reader team is going to integrate more social features
• Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share
• Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.
• Reader might be more directly monetized in the future, but Google wants to watch out showing ads next to other people’s content. This is a problem with Google News too. They might do something like they did with the non-free Opera: show the content owners’ ads in the interface when they’re AdSense publishers.

There’s heaps more - but the above interested me most. I think that the idea that they’d allow publishers who show AdSense to have their ads show in the feed is an interesting possibility that might help publishers monetize their feeds.

Also that they’ll be recommending feeds to readers is something that I think will advantage some bloggers - the question will be - how does one get on the list of recommended feeds? What sort of algorithm will determine who gets recommended? I know that some of the very biggest blogs with massive feed subscriber numbers have really benefited from being a default feed in feed readers - so this could really launch some lucky blogs!

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The idea isn’t to have a bun fight over the topic but to flesh it out and engage in some good conversation and learning.

The Topic

The topic for this debate is ‘Full or Partial RSS Feeds?’ - it’s a topic I get asked about a lot and which I know there are good arguments for on both sides.

The Speakers

I’ve chosen two speakers for this debate that I think will get a good conversation going. They are:

Arguing for Partial Feeds is Gina Trapani - editor of the famous Lifehacker blog.

Arguing for Full Feeds is Rick Klau - former VP, Publisher Services at FeedBurner and currently in Strategic Partner Development at Google.

I should say before we start that I put Gina in a position of having to argue for something that she isn’t convinced of herself. She generously agree to participate however.

So without further ado - here’s some thoughts from Gina and Rick to get our discussion going. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts in comments below - no matter what they might be.

The Argument for Partial Feeds

Gina Trapani - editor at Lifehacker
At Lifehacker.com we offer a choice of either a full-post feed (with ads) or partial feeds (no ads.) While giving the reader a choice is a good thing (at the expense of adding an extra step to the subscription process), I can see why a publisher or a reader might prefer less-popular partial feeds.

As a publisher, providing a pull quote in your feed instead of the full post gives you the advantage of seeing which stories your readers are interested enough to click on. A lot of people assume that publishers use partial feeds just for extra on-page ad views, and that may be true in some cases. But back when I published a personal site - and advertisement-free site - I used partial feeds for editorial purposes. The necessary clicks from feed items served as instant reader feedback. You simply can’t do the kind of traffic tracking with full feeds than you can do with partial ones.

As a reader, I prefer partial feeds in some cases, especially from news sources who can summarize the point of the article in one sentence. Skimming CNET’s partial post feed, which just includes the story lead, is a lot easier and more efficient than including the entire article.

The Argument for Full Feeds

Rick Klau - former VP, Publisher Services at FeedBurner and currently in Strategic Partner Development at Google.

More than half a million publishers have burned nearly 900,000 feeds over at www.feedburner.com , so it should come as no surprise how often we are asked which is better: full-text or partial feeds? While there is no single, “right” answer that covers all situations, there are a number of often overlooked angles to consider.

First, I’d like to clear up a few points of confusion. Clickthroughs alone are an imperfect (if not altogether inaccurate) measure of a reader’s interest in a story. Partial feeds often make it harder, not easier, for a reader to know whether they’re interested in a story at all. If you just include a sentence or two of a post in a feed, you’re asking the reader to click through to read the rest of the post - when the actual substance of the post is not at all obvious from those first few sentences.

Regarding Gina’s statement that “you simply can’t do the kind of traffic tracking with full feeds that you can do with partial ones” - I respectfully disagree. Publishers who use FeedBurner’s feed management services can measure both feed item views ( i.e., posts which are read in the aggregator) as well as clickthroughs - giving them an accurate view of both clickthroughs, and more importantly, the clickthrough rate. This is true for both full feeds and partial feeds… and is often the best way to measure how engaged your audience is with your content. It should be noted that in feeds who’ve compared full and partial feeds, we’ve seen no hard evidence suggesting that partial feeds alone increase the clickthrough rate.

Now for some reasons why full feeds are in a publisher’s (and a reader’s) best interest. I think Mike Masnick at TechDirt hit the nail on the head earlier this week when he posted about this question:

[F]ull text feeds actually … lead to more page views… Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.

As I wrote earlier this year on our corporate blog, full posts also contain far richer information within the posts - hyperlinks - that can be exploited by services like TechMeme, Technorati, and other RSS-aware services. Those links are valuable indicators of the relationships between posts - which can yield tremendous context for readers who want to discover related content. Partial posts rob readers (and automated services) of that context, as the hyperlinks themselves aren’t included in the partial posts.

Commercial publishers who distribute feeds often worry about the lack of revenue - they make money on their site and are understandably concerned that they are “giving away” their content through the feed. But it’s possible to monetize your feed directly (through FeedBurner’s feed and blog ad network, among other options) - and if you buy Masnick’s argument above, traffic to your site will actually increase thanks to the fuller feed (which means your site revenue will increase as well!).

Readers clearly prefer full feeds over partial feeds; one need only see the outcry from Freakonomics readers (read the comments) last week when they switched from a full feed to a partial feed to understand that readers value the delivery of information in its entirety, to an environment (their newsreader) they prefer. Certainly there are occasions when a partial feed is required: many commercial publishers have licensing issues that prevent them from including full text in the feed, and in those cases, some content’s better than no content. But when it’s better for the readers (who get what they want, where they want it), better for the publishers (who can drive more revenue and satisfy their users), and better for the ecosystem (which get more information, which allows them to add more value to their users), it’s my opinion that full feeds are simply better.

Have Your Say

OK - Rick and Gina have kicked the conversation off - it’s time to have your say!

Do you use Full Feeds, Partial Feeds - or both? Why?

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