Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work
For the past couple of months Blog Herald has been subtly attacking me. I thought it was just one of those suckups trying to bait me to link to them but today I saw the real reason for Duncan’s tone: he thinks I don’t want him or anyone else to make money off of content (that link takes you to his post titled: Steve Rubel doesn’t get it: RSS advertising sucks).
He’s wrong about my views, but he’s not the only one (I was forwarded some email from a private mailing list where some of the participants skewered me in the same way that Blog Herald just did but in a more personal way — all because I want full-text feeds).
Ahh, I see Kent Newsome sees through Duncan’s post.
So, let’s get to it: what are my views?
1) That I won’t subscribe to any feed that isn’t full text. Well, except for my brother’s blog.
2) That treating RSS readers well will get you more Web browser readers.
3) That full-text sites will be more profitable because of this than partial-text sites.
So, let’s look at the world of RSS. First, you MUST separate the world into two buckets:
1) The way they are today.
2) The way we want them to be tomorrow.
Personally I want a world where everyone uses a feed reader and subscribes to their favorite blogs, news sites, etc. But let’s be honest. Such a world is a LONG way from being here. We could go into the reasons, but that’s for another post at another time. Let’s not rathole on this.
Instead, let’s look at how things are TODAY. Today only a very small percentage of people use RSS and RSS News Aggregators. Even if you include the people who don’t have any clue that they are using RSS (like those people who use live.com or MyYahoo to subscribe).
The reason RSS advertising doesn’t work today is:
1) The audiences are too small.
2) The audiences are too geeky and too full of smart people. Hint, those people don’t click on advertisements unless they are very targetted!
Now when I talk with audiences I see two trends: 1) Blog-heavy audiences, like the Northern Voice conference, have about 80% usage of RSS News Aggregators (these audiences do NOT represent the mainstream user). 2) Blog-lite audiences, like Ireland’s IT@Cork conference, only see about 2% RSS usage (these are far more mainstream — in fact, I’d argue that the mainstream user is far less likely to use RSS than that. Heck, if you really want to get mainstream, only about 1/6th of the world’s population even uses a computer).
But, now, how do you get traffic to visit your content? Well, I’ve been studying that too. There are a few ways:
1) Get your content listed on a news site with a lot of flow. Something like Yahoo or Google or MSN’s news page. Not many of us have access to that. With one exception that I’ll note below.
2) Get a journalist with a lot of flow to link to you. When the New York Times links to you you’ll get lots of flow.
3) Get lots of bloggers to link to you. I do get lots of flow when lots of bloggers link to me.
4) Get the memetrackers like Digg, Memeorandum, TailRank, Slashdot etc to link to you.
Yeah, there are probably others, but in terms of buckets of how you get traffic, these are the major ones.
OK, you might be reading my words in an RSS aggregator, right? What happens when you click on a link? It takes you to a Web browser, right?
Ahhh! That’s how you can make money!
Aside, there are at least three ways content owners today make money off of advertising:
1) Show a banner ad when you visit the page (the content owner gets paid everytime you visit that page. For instance, I just went to cnn.com and there’s a banner ad there and they probably got a few cents from my visit.
2) Click-to-pay advertising. You see all those Google ads all over the place? Chris Pirillo’s blog, for instance, has Google ads (so does Blog Herald). These sites only get paid if you actually click on the advertising. For instance, some of the words you click on can be worth up to $60 PER CLICK to Google and other advertising companies (like Mortgages).
3) Interruptive advertising. News.com uses a lot of these kinds of ads. They are Flash movies that fly over the page, or pop up, or run across the page until you click their close or “skip” buttons. These are also paid by impression, or everytime you load the browser up.
Anyway, back to traffic. To get it, first you should appease the connectors. Er, the bloggers, the journalists, and the geeks.
You see, when I get together with journalists their RSS usage is WAY WAY WAY higher than the rest of the population. Journalists are like me. They sift through lots of information looking for the gems for their readers. That’s how they build audiences. RSS lets people read about 10 times the amount of content than if you just use a Web browser. That’s why journalists, connectors, bloggers, geeks who care about productivity, etc use RSS. It’s also why advertising in RSS isn’t yet working. These people aren’t good targets for loosely-targetted advertising.
Here’s a question: if you were an advertising company, what advertisement would you put into this post? One for diapers? Digital cameras? RSS aggregators?
Most of the algorithms for advertising would just look at the words I typed. So, now you’ll get ads for all the above. Loosely-targetted. This isn’t like going to a search engine and actively searching for, say, digital camera info, and getting a Nikon advertisement. Geeks, connectors, journalists LIKE that kind of advertising. But we don’t like interruptive styles of advertising. Which is what we get in RSS feeds today.
So, how does anyone make any money?
Well, let’s stay in TODAY’S world. In today’s world you get journalists, geeks, bloggers, connectors, to read your content and link to it. That’ll bring a larger audience to visit your Web page. How do you do that? Serve out full-text RSS. Why? Cause by doing that you treat the connector with the most possible respect and give him/her the easiest way to consume your content and link to it.
Then you put advertising on your page. That could be a banner ad. That could be a Google AdSense block (or Yahoo or MSN’s equivilent). Or you could even be really rude and put a Flash ad interstitial (I’ve seen more and more of this kind of “interruptive” advertising). Or, you could get really creative like Honda did and create advertising people will link to as content itself.
Since only a small percentage of your audience will be using RSS (even if you’re a tech blogger, less than half of your audience will be using RSS on the average day) you’ll make money.
Now, the fear is that the model will go away tomorrow thanks to RSS being built into IE 7, Safari, Firefox, Opera and other browsers. Whoa! Alert, alert, if that happens that means the unwashed masses won’t be seeing your interstitial Flash advertisements anymore, or refreshing your banner ads, or seeing your Google AdSense blocks.
OK, in such a world advertising will have to change. But, let’s be honest, what percentage of people will use RSS in such a world? I’d argue that it’ll be a small percentage for a very long time. My mom just doesn’t read enough sites to care about RSS. I doubt she will until she gets into blogging (which is possible, but I don’t expect it anytime soon).
Plus, what makes the usage model of reading a Web page in an aggregator so different from reading it in a browser window? Why couldn’t Google put the same AdSense block into RSS that it puts next to Chris Pirillo’s content, for instance? Oh, wait, Google is already doing that.
But, that’s also ratholing in an argument that really deserves its own post.
What people who say that full-text RSS hurts their advertising possibilities don’t get is that if you treat connectors, bloggers, journalists better, you’ll get MORE audience to your Web pages, which will get you more advertising hits.
Or am I missing something here? Either way, you can call me all the names you want, but I won’t subscribe to partial text feeds. Yes, I’m more likely to link to Web pages that also serve full-text feeds out. But don’t mistake my demand that my content providers treat me better with some theory that I don’t want them to make money. That simply isn’t true and represents the worst of “stick-your-head-in-the-sand” kind of anti-change thinking. If you want to make money in this new world you are far more likely to do so by working with your best customers to find new ways to build audiences and serve better advertising toward them.
The one exception above? The folks who run Yahoo, MSN, and Microsoft’s main pages are heavy users of RSS. Why? Cause they are paid to find the best content. If they aren’t using RSS aggregators today I’d argue they should be fired. Why? Cause they aren’t being as productive as someone else (I can prove that an editor who reads content in an RSS aggregator is far more productive than someone who only uses a Web browser).
But, what do you think? Are content providers going to gain anything to tell connectors, journalists, bloggers to screw off?
PS: Dave Winer has an interesting post this morning on why formats like RSS 2.0 work.
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:31 am
Man it’s been ages since I posted a comment, but anyway just to throw my 2 cents in here, the whole point of RSS is to read content when and where you want it.
RSS is the Tivo of information, the iTunes of text.
How would you feel if your tivo only recorded the first 15 minutes of a 2 hour movie? How would you feel if your iPod only had the first 30 seconds of a 4 minute song? Not too happy now would you.
Content needs, wants, and should be unleashed so that I don’t even need a typical browser to read content anymore, just some device that takes an RSS feed.
I too am like you Scoble, the moment I subscribe to a feed and see that it’s partial I just email the host, and unsubscribe.
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:35 am
Great post, I was complaining about just this the other day.
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:40 am
Since switching from partial to full RSS feeds I didn’t experience any change in advertising revenues.
Unlike me, many publishers do experience substantial decrease in revenue. The problem here is that it might push publishers to use in-content advertising that will be aggregated as legitimate content. I’m not sure I’m ready for that just yet.
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:40 am
Just to add one more thing, the content providers themselves are inherently screwed because the definition of “Content Provider” is rapidly changing thanks to blogs.
Once something hits the net, there will be someone who will churn out a clean, raw, usefull form of said content to be distributed amongst the people.
Bad website design, server timeouts, pop ups that hide content, none of that has been present in my world ever since I started using RSS about a year ago. The web browser will always be about surfing, but anyone serious about their news, and I know you and I Scoble are certified news addicts, will use an aggregator for everything.
The thing that will make full feeds obvious in the coming years will be the rise of eBook readers based on eInk technology. The whole definition of newspaper will change. Those people who read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal on their eReaders will start a trend that will only grow. RSS will be THE ideal way of communicating content, and that’s when you will see 75%+ people using RSS (without even knowing it too!)
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:45 am
amorson: I’ve had some publishers claim the same thing with me, but when I push them for proof they always back down and start hemming and hawing. The claim that full text feeds reduce revenue just DOES NOT stand up to scrutiny. Even if it were tried, only a small percentage of anyone’s readers would switch to RSS. Even me, who has a much higher percentage of RSS readers than most sites has only a small percentage. And my traffic is growing. Three years ago I only had 2,000 readers a day. Now I’m up to more than 10,000.
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:51 am
Your long post is one justification for partial feeds. You can skim through many partials at a glance…I have gone back on forth on the issue of full v/s partial but why has it become so religious - if someone makes his sole decision on whether or not to read a blog based on if the feed is partial or full text, I would suggest the blog writer probably does not need that fickle reader…
Look at it from a blog writer’s perspective. Should they write for the fringe reader or those that participate, comment, link etc? It’s classic business scenario - you want to cater to a core consumer base, and opportunistically to a casual customer base
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:54 am
Vinnie: you need a better news reader that lets you skim, even if posts are long. I only see headlines in mine, but first post is previewed.
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:57 am
Vinnie: if you want traffic you must cater to the connectors, bloggers, and journalists. Here’s a point: yesterday I had about 17,000 readers. If you want me to link to you (which will drive between 200 and 2,000 people to you, maybe more with a sensationalistic link) then you’ll need to treat me well. Treat me badly and I’ll be less likely to link to you. That might sound arrogant, but I have 840+ feeds that provide full text and that treat me well. Why do I need to read your partial-text feed? If you’re the New York Times I might put up with that kind of abuse (and it IS abuse cause I want full text. I HATE partial text feeds. Hate them. Got that?)
You need a better RSS aggregator if you think partial text feeds are better.
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:59 am
Keeping a blog alive after a while is a matter of accepting to write valuable content for free. If you are still doing that after a few months, then either you have got an agenda (derailing your competitors, drawing circles around you to protect your job as a marketing person, …), or you are clueless, or you have way too much time in your hands. In both cases though, you pretend to be a journalist. What for? I have no idea. Perhaps it’s an ego thing.
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:01 am
I think it depends on the kind of blog and the content. There are some blogs that I am grateful for having full-text feeds and others I wish had them. At the same time I can say the same for some full-text feeds that shouldn’t be.
My personal blog supplies a full-text feed, but my website’s RSS only provides an abstract and a link. Some of the tutorials are long and full of graphic elements, if the abstract interests you, click the link, if not, you can skip it and you just saved us both some bandwidth.
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:03 am
good point on reader technology which allows viewing of partial feeds…
on your second point, not every reader is Scoble. Too much of blog world is based on us feeding each other. The business IT audience I write for barely comments or links…but does read blogs…
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:11 am
A few points for you:
1. YES, we see an increase in pageviews when we move to partial feeds.
2. YES, we see an increase in ad clicks when we move to partial text feeds.
3. Your argument that going full text encourages more people to visit the site, while also admitting that less than 1% of peopel actually use RSS, is a little circular.
And, finally, if we can’t “prove” (note: I’ve NEVER backed down from you on this discussion) that full text feeds result in less traffic to a website (which, really, is just common sense), then how are you going to PROVE that it somehow means more traffic?
Saying that you have gobs of traffic and you *might* read the blog, and then out of your 10 posts *might* link to it and that some of your readers *might* visit isn’t motivation enough to most publishers.
Personally, I’d rather give readers BOTH a full-text, ad supported feed AND a partial-text non-ad feed. Choice. But, either way, users are ‘paying’ with their eyeballs to view the content. Which is the way it should be.
Also, I’ve done 2 conferences this month already. Both of them were ‘industry’ conferences (one marketing, one fashion). In both, RSS readership, blog readership AND blog authorship were above 30%.
It’s growing in the mainstream. Maybe not in Cork (hello, the UK is well known to be behind the curve, no idea why you raised Cork as some bastion of normality). But it is growing.
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:12 am
Vinnie: good point, which is why there are a ton of different kinds of aggregators. MyYahoo or Live.com is a ton different than IE 7 which is a ton different than RSS Bandit or FeedDemon which is a ton different than NewsGator which is a ton different than Dave Winer’s OPML Editor/River of News. Some only display headlines. Some display river of news. Some do three-pane email style views.
I am not opposed to content producers providing BOTH full text and partial text feeds. On my cell phone I tell NewsGator to only bring partial text so that I can get the headlines faster, for instance. But it’s MY CHOICE. I love choice! I hate it when a content producer thinks he or she knows how I’ll read his or her content better than I do (or, worse, if he or she adds a business model decision into that).
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:16 am
Jeremy: I don’t believe you, but I guess you know better. Personally, when you link to me you don’t send me much traffic at all, so not sure where all this traffic on your sites is.
But, that’s beside the point.
I didn’t say that. I said that if you want me to read your site, you need to provide full-text feeds. I’m far more likely to link to people who have full-text feeds than those who have only partial text feeds. Why? Cause I read them more often.
I guess if you’re doing fine without me, no reason to worry at all. Just keep doing what you’re doing.
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:23 am
>Your argument that going full text encourages more people to visit the site, while also admitting that less than 1% of peopel actually use RSS, is a little circular.
No, it’s not. Let’s say I have 10,000 readers today. Let’s say 1% of them read my blog in an RSS Aggregator. That still leaves, what, 9,900 in the Web browser, right? Now, what you and I both know is that those readers are not all the same. Some of those readers also have 10,000 readers. Let’s say that’s you. Do you read my blog in an aggregator? Based on how fast you answered here, I’d guess yes.
So, now, not only are you much more likely to link to me cause you’re pissed off at what I wrote, but you’re much more likely to have 10,000 readers (like you have noticed, RSS users are highly likely to also be bloggers or journalists or connectors — in my research they are FAR more likely to have 10,000 readers than those people who only read me in a browser).
So, now, let’s say you link to me. That’ll probably send me 2,000 people (if you had 10,000). So, now I have 2,000 more readers today that I otherwise would have had. Let’s say those are 99% Web readers, and only 1% RSS readers. So, now, I have way more traffic.
Now, continue this out. Let’s say I turned to partial text feeds and 10% of my RSS readers unsubscribed. What kind of hit is that to my traffic?
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:38 am
The thing is, full content feed are also good for traffic, as RSS indexing bots get more chance to index you well if they can actually read what’s your writing about (and not only the 50 first words). That’s point #1 out of 5 reasons why partial content feeds sucks :)
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:13 am
Robert, it doesn’t work like that at all.
You have 10,000 readers. When you link, you send maybe 500 people. Of those, 10% will read again, and 10% will become “readers”. So, 5 readers for your link.
“Now, continue this out. Let’s say I turned to partial text feeds and 10% of my RSS readers unsubscribed. What kind of hit is that to my traffic?”
Ahhh, here’s the meat of it. Say 10% unsubscribe. But, if they are 40% more likely to click, the 90% of readers are generating much, MUCH more traffic than the 100%.
Yes, I know you’ll go all “but what if those 10% were connectors” on me. It doesn’t wash. I’ve been in the game long enough to know that connectors are fickle, their audiences are fickle and that readership transference isn’t as simple as 1 link. If it was, EVERYONE would have millions of readers.
Think about it. If EVERY link you sent had 10,000 people going to it, and if EVERY one of those became a reader, you’d be turning hundreds of blogs into million-reader blogs EVERY month.
And you and I both know that just isn’t happening. Yes, once every week or so you hop on a big “conversational thread” whereby some nobody gets a few dozen links.
Like that guy who was on top of wordpress.com for a few days. Now where is he? Nowhere.
Traffic doesn’t equal readers. RSS subscribers don’t equal traffic.
To say otherwise is to, again, get pretty circular. The reason you want full text RSS feeds is so you don’t have to visit a site, after all.
And, as far as you not visiting or reading sites that have partial text feeds, the irony must be lost on you. The Blog Herald is one of our partial text sites.
And, as far as “so not sure where all this traffic on your sites is”, our sites aren’t for you. Sure, we have a few that fall into the techy realm, but most are for topics that A Listers and “connectors” don’t care about: aviation, crocheting, personal finance, handmade creations, wrestling, etc.
That doesnt’ mean our traffic doesn’t matter though :)
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:15 am
Robert, too many sites interpret full text feeds to mean I’m giving them the right to reprint my content. I’m not. That why I don’t do a full text feed.
Yep, I could put a copyright statement in the feed saying don’t reprint everything, but people don’t look at that. Heck, people reprint without permission right now even without a full text feed.
If someone has good content, I’ll take the feed full text or not and clickthrough. Deciding that everyone must have full text feeds is simply assuming we are publishers who are all the same, and we simply are not.
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:18 am
“Now, continue this out. Let’s say I turned to partial text feeds and 10% of my RSS readers unsubscribed. What kind of hit is that to my traffic?”
Actually I love this. Lots, and lots of people LIKE partial text feeds. They’re skimmable (and, no, lots of people dont’ want to use feed readers that only give headlines - and saying they have to switch to get the efficiencies of full text feed reading is, well, ironic).
So, what if 10% of your traffic unsubscribes over time because your posts are too long?
It’s a two-edged sword, which is why I’m a proponent of having both full AND partial feeds. You get all the benefits of both. Readers get to choose what is best for them.
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:29 am
This is pure speculation not based on any data. If you can prove to me that full text feeds result in more money, then I’ll believe you.
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:47 am
Scobleizer flames the full vs. partial RSS feed debate
Scobleizer has a great post on why he hates partial RSS feeds. He even explains why RSS advertising currently doesn’t work by stating:The reason RSS advertising doesnt work today is:1) The audiences are too small.2) The audiences are too geeky…
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:49 am
Despite the downsides, of which Jeremy and others have mentioned, I still want readers to be able to experience the content however they choose and that’s why we use full text RSS. Not on every blog but most of our blogs. This is an inherent risk as a publisher I accept and every blogger, small to large is a publisher and gets to decide what risk they want to take.
I’m not as black and white as you, Scoble when it comes to full text RSS but I do prefer full text because some readers help me shrink the content (like the Safari RSS reader) with a handy slider so I can see it in smaller chunks if I want.
Many of my posts are long, so a partial feed probably would cater to some percentage of readers but we’ve even gone one step further for readers and made it so every keyword on our blog can become an RSS feed. Readers can get only the content they are interested in or suck on the firehose, it’s up to them. They are in control. I like giving them that control.
Yes, Danny Sullivan, it means people rip off our content, retool and repurpose it and it finds its way to splogs galore, despite our copyright notice on every page and in the RSS feed.
Content being scraped and ripped from webpages without permission (a la the dishonest mashups) seems to be happening in this new Web We Rip Of You Point Oh revolution. So it just makes it easier for these thieves to steal your content when it’s full text RSS, but it doesn’t mean they still can’t steal it right from your webpage.
There are three different concerns here: what to do about DMCA violations (publisher), how to give the reader what he wants (reader) and whether giving the reader full text RSS feeds has any significant impact on advertising (publisher).
I suspect those who worry more about giving the reader — focusing on the content they are coming to see, instead of the content they aren’t coming to see (advertising) — what he wants will still be doing this in the years to come vs. those who try to squeeze every available penny out of their readers.
Scoble might be wrong about a number of things, but he does seem to care about readers and cares as a reader. I respect that and can see where readers like Scoble can be served and money can still be made.
Be careful of greed, folks.
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:00 am
I didn’t get the whole ‘full vs partial’ argument until I started browsing from a PDA whilst sitting on the train. The practicalities of your PDA getting a GPRS or 3G connection, pulling in the data at sub-broadband speed, and attempting to render the page you want (which probably isn’t optimised for mobile browsing). And then doing it again for the next full story. Blimey. Still… I’m glad I didn’t pull this epic post in via PDA, full feed or not. That would have eaten my entire bandwidth allocation for the month. :)
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:03 am
Here is a good question related to this debate, is the purpose of your content to be read & appreciated by as many people as possible or is it for you to make as much money through advertising revenue as possible?
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:10 am
Jase: It’s to be read by as many people as possible, while providing an income to our writers, so they can continue writing pieces that their audience wants to read.
This isn’t about “greed”. This is about a give and take business relationship. Readers get what they want (good content), how they want it (full or partial text feeds). And publishers and authors get what they want, which is eyeballs and the money necessary to sustain the content.
The only person losing out is the idealist, who wants content to be free, without ads, because it offends his sensibilities.
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:11 am
I Notice Things II
I trust Scoble will be dropping Tech.memeorandum from the blogroll like the partial-feed having hot potato that it is.
…
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:27 am
No wonder you get dissenting posts with a condescending tone like that…try spreading less of the ‘we the Mircrosoft Empire’ vibe.
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:35 am
Hi, frist post :)
With all due respect, I think you’re speaking from personal preferences (you like the full feed / hate partial feed) and not from facts or even research.
Have you in fact conducted representative usability studies across a range of newsreaders, platforms, and topics? Have you conducted similar studies of ROI?
Don’t bother, I know the answer, as you’re not in research but in blogging. But, has anyone? At all?
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:45 am
I disagree, Jeremy. For some publishers, it very much is about greed. Not saying that’s you, but it certainly is the case for some out there. Some blogs are so whored up with ads — both in the RSS feeds and on the websites — that readers can’t even tell where the content begins and advertising ends.
I don’t mind full text RSS with ads, that seems like a fair tradeoff, but I do mind blogs where the focus on advertising overlaps and invades the reader experience.
This will just drive more readers to tools like GreaseMonkey and Norton’s Antispam where the ads are stripped out. This scenario certainly doesn’t benefit publishers as a whole.
Here there be tigers.
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:50 am
Robert you have hit the nail on the head with this article, I dont link nor do I read blogs that have partial RSS feeds, they are wasting my time. I never click on adsense ads even when i am in a browser but I do link to articles like this one and even post to articles like this one directly from my feed reader. Will I drive traffic to you absolutley will it be a lot who knows, but its traffic you may not have gotted otherwise.
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:50 am
My readers matter more then my page-view stats.
Newspapers have been sending readers to page 34 from page 1 for ages, just for the sake of advertisers.
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:51 am
TDavid: Agreed. We’re really trying to balance a positive user experience with the earnest needs for writers to earn more than a few bucks a post. The challenge is that you can’t do one without the writers. Favor writers too much (ie: too many ads) and you lose readers (and then writers). Favor readers too much (ie: no ads) and you lose writesr, and then readers.
For for-profit blog publishers (all kinds of publishers really, but blog publishers more than other types), RSS is the bread and butter of getting the word out there - but it can also kill you (server load, no return without ads in full text feeds, content theft, etc).
But I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’s a great industry to be in!
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:08 am
Robert, this is an excellent post (especially since you got all the way through it without mentioning your phone du jour one time).
However, SimonD has an excellent point; namely PDAs and for that matter smart phones.
Do you actually want full RSS feeds on those devices? Personally I would go for full RSS on the desktop/laptop: yes…on PDAs and smart phones: no.
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:33 am
The real debate here is not about full text vs partial text RSS feeds — this is just a symptom. The real debate is about what the future of content monetization is going to look like. As you point out, people are increasingy tuning out of advertising anyway — whether it is on a web page, in a feed, or anywhere else in media. Since the content industry has evolved largely on an advertising supported business model, naturally there is an enormous fear as this model dissipates — either through distribution methods that eliminate ads or through the loss of audience attention. So the really interesting question is — how should content providers make money? And lets ask this question in its most difficult form — how should our society support writing like the recent Washinton Post or New York Times articles that exposed excesses in the current administration? Inherently this is not something that you can attach advertising to directly — you have to support it through an association with other things (today classifieds) that will generate revenue. So assuming we all think that this kind of reporting is essential to a democracy, how is it funded in the future? If you can solve this problem, the issue of “full” vs. “partial” rss feeds will go away.
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:42 am
Actually on PDAs and Smarphones is exactly when you want a full feed as another reader pointed out as you want to be able to read the full article then & there without having to load it in your browser.
Skimming through even full RSS feeds should be easy like in Quicknews on my Treo I just hit space bar to jump to the next article so I can see the title, maybe pueruse the first paragraph, if it interests me I keep reading otherwise I hit space and continue on, also there is probably some option to shorten the article display in the summary or something that you could enable.
Advertising in blogs as a concept doesn’t worry me when there is content to justify it but nothing annoys me more than seeing Google AdSense on blogs like Joe Blow’s Blog especially if they have like three panels of AdSense and even more so if they have other advertising as well.
However even when the content is worth it the advertising can go over the top *cough*Engadget*cough*, why does a site owned by AOL need so much damn advertising?
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:50 am
I looked at the previous comments and don’t think this argument was mentioned. Everybody seems to be ignoring bandwidth costs. Sites like This Week in Tech claim to pay tens of thousands on their RSS bandwidth alone. Sites that fall under a corporate umbrella like Engadget can afford to pay that, but it’s not a viable option for popular sites that don’t have money to burn.
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:57 am
Richard: Good point. On a bandwidth share to cost basis, RSS costs us 300$ per month. Since we’re seeing about 80% monthly growth, that cost will start to balloon pretty quickly, and simply hoping people go to the website often isn’t enough.
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:58 am
Gee, here’s a new topic that I haven’t heard you rant on before. (Rolls Eyes).
Why can’t you give freedom to others, in reading and publishing media as they want, on their terms. I happen to like partial text, gives me a quick overview, instead of pulling the whole darn thing down, if I want I clink in, I clink in. And if you want FULL then go Avantgo or other places where full is default. A sydicational format, is surprise, a syndicational format.
Why do bloggers demand the world conform to their little own navel-gazing world? Geesh, not everyone has the same needs or motivations as you do. And funny, I don’t see you whining about Memetrackes, like Memeorandum which are all partial. Or is that your next rant?
February 22nd, 2006 at 10:03 am
You have to put the audience first - and that means giving them as many choices as possible. They want to read your articles in a feedreader, fine. They want to go to your site. Great.
Advertising has to come second. You have to find ways to bring the ads to the readers, without annoying them or inconveniencing them or tricking them in any way. Google thought this way, and made a lot of money. Blogs should think that way too.
If you don’t please your audience, they will go somewhere else.
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:15 am
Robert, you use NewsGator, right? One thing I have found helpful for partial feeds that I decide I want to read (such as MSDN, microsoft watch) is the fetchlinks plugin, which is available at
http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/msw.xml
Basically, it gets the link from each feed and downloads the HTML from that page as the text for the entry. Some other rss readers have a built-in option for this. Fetchlinks does miss some links occasionally, but I find it better than nothing. Also, Newsgator allows you to set whether to use fetch links on a feed by feed basis (on the rendering tab).
While I agree with your points for the most part, I can see reason not to include the full content of a feed. Mainly from the perspective of MSDN, whose entries are very long sometimes. I do think only doing partial feeds for the sake of advertising is bad reasoning however.
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:16 am
[...] Just when you think you’re speaking in a private forum, this happens. He’s wrong about my views, but he’s not the only one (I was forwarded some email from a private mailing list where some of the participants skewered me in the same way that Blog Herald just did but in a more personal way — all because I want full-text feeds). — Scobelizer [...]
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:16 am
sorry. bad link. Must have hit the wrong button on copy/paste. the link (which I got from newsgator’s website is…
http://graemef.com/?q=project/fetchlinks
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:29 am
i agree whole heartedly with full feeds. What i don;t understand is that on the scobleizer rss feed in bloglines its still showing partial even though i set it to full….:S
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:51 am
weiyen: what news reader are you using?
Jeremy: when I linked to Podtech.net I sent him more than 10,000 unique viewers (according to him). So, at least some of my links pull a sizeable audience.
Christopher: I don’t read memetrackers in RSS. I visit a handful of pages in Web browsers cause they change too often.
Also, I’m not saying you ONLY have to provide full text feeds. I’m perfectly happy if a content owner provides both full text and partial text feeds.
Mike: some feeds I want partial, some I want full (most I want full, though, even on my smart phone).
Yeah, I gotta use the FetchLinks product. I keep forgetting to load that.
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Hi, Robert
I respect your perspective, but I’d suggest that your personal preference for full-text feed is just that — one person’s preference; not a sound basis for blanket advice to online publishers.
In my case, I’ve chosen not to offer a full-text feed for Contentious.com and RightConversation.com for several reasons. These are:
1) Partial feeds (and e-mail alerts based on those feeds) are the only way I can get clickthrough information about which of my articles are most popular — one of my most valuable tools for planning and refining my content strategy.
2) Like you, I often write at a length which is unwieldy for common feed reader tools and services. I don’t think telling people to “get a better feed reader” is very constructive for building a relationship with your audience.
3) My content already gets stolen and plagiarized often. I do consider that a problem, and I believe a full-text feed would only exacerbate that problem.
4) One core purpose of my blogs is to market my professional services. I choose not to cram every blog posting (or feed item) with marketing messages, but I do need to make that marketing connection. If people have no reason to visit my site, I don’t get that benefit.
I realize you probably disagree with some or all of these considerations, and that’s fine. Still it seems to me that your arguments in favor of all online publishers offering full-text feeds is based solely in your preference.
Personally, I think this consideration can vary widely by publication, goal, and target audience.
Thanks,
- Amy Gahran
Contentious.com
RightConversation.com
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Amy: to be clear, this is my opinion and I do realize that other people don’t agree with it. That’s cool.
I wish you had full text feeds cause I want to read your content, but the competition for my time is fierce, so I’ll stick with only full-text feeds, sorry.
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:31 pm
That’s totally fine, Robert. And while I appreciate the occasional attention you’ve given my work, ultimately you don’t represent my target audience. I need to set my priorities and make my decisions according to my goals and my target audience.
- Amy Gahran
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Amy: that’s cool. I do see your work pop up occassionally in Memeorandum (which means other bloggers are watching your stuff, even if I don’t want to).
Thanks for considering my points.
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Danny, thank you! That’s exactly what I was going to say.
Yes, scraping will always happen. But full-text RSS just makes it way too easy for the sploggers, and it’s doubly bad because some do it and don’t even realize it’s wrong - they think that’s what RSSyndication was made for.
I would put ads in my feed, but:
1. It doesn’t work (financially).
2. I do want people to syndicate my headlines and partial text, which doesn’t work with ads.
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Re: FetchLinks
The next version (2.6, currently in beta) of NewsGator for Outlook includes this functionality built in. Check out the feature intro posted by the lead dev:
http://www.newsgator.com/forum/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=24&messageid=12513
For more details on the 2.6 beta, see this post:
http://www.newsgator.com/forum/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=24&MessageID=12482
Disclaimer: I am a NewsGator employee
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Amy: You don’t sound contentious to me ;)
Robert: I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on bandwidth costs in regards to RSS. Should Jeremy Wright pay more than his $300/month in the competition for your attention? This Week in Tech pays tens of thousands on their full text feed for your attention. They have to make their time to live value a whopping 12 hours to cut down on requests (though many RSS readers supposedly ignore TTL)
You know, I would go so far as to say with RSS’s bandwidth intensive stupid distribution model, the internet is simply not ready for full text RSS. Bandwidth is far too intensive. I think nobody has the right to tout full text feeds as essential and tell others to do that until you get your own server and start posting the bill for your RSS feed.
That is, unless your vision of the future is an internet made solely of bloggers on wordpress, typepad, and blogger.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Personally, I think this consideration can vary widely by publication, goal, and target audience.
Totally. But lazy bloggers demand the world spoon-fed them info. But missing important news as it just not full-text feeded, strikes me as well, stupidly clueless and arrogant to boot. Not a good practice either, as some of my best info sources are all partial.
Full, partial, snippet, abstract, hint, rumor, comment in passing, something overheard — information is information, I am not going to have temper-tantrums over the format. This is yet another example why bloggers or citizen journo’s will never replace real journalists. Unable to focus, or pinpoint the important, in the sea of information, they demand all now, no legwork needed.
HaloGate and RSSGate, even Scobles most diehard supporters are starting to think he’s gone loopy. But thankfully, everyone is all ADD’ed, so onto the next big thing.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:08 pm
“the competition for my time is fierce, so I’ll stick with only full-text feeds, sorry.”
My advice to you Mr. Scoble: Never forget how high your horse is, the higher it grows, the harder the fall.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:21 pm
I think Joe Public has a point.
What worries me is the amount of Internet energy someone like Scoble manages to shift. As if any of what he had to say was REALLY that important in life.
Like British plawright David Hare once said in his play ‘My Zinc Bed’: “like Rome, Microsoft will also fall” which is actually similar to what my gran used to say when I was a girl, albeit in her own sort of way: “don’t matter how well-to-do them folks think they are, they’ll all end up 12 feet under like the rest of us”.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:49 pm
About the bandwidth argument, at the moment Scoble’s feed is 124,449 bytes and when served via Gzip sends 31,531 bytes across the wire, bandwidth is usually measured in GB and as a baseline lets say costs 50c per GB even though you can probably get it even cheaper.
Scoble’s feed could be served up a total of 34,053 times for 50c of bandwidth:
1,073,741,824 bytes (1GB) / 31,531 bytes = 34,053.529
So for a typical month of 30 days, over 30,000 reads of the RSS feed a day would cost only $15. Now if you use a dedicated file serving plan for something like $60/month that gives you 500GB of bandwidth a month and generate a cache of your RSS feed there you would be able to support something like 480,000 reads of the RSS file a day based upon Scoble’s current feed size.
Just how popular are the sites quoting $10,000 bandwidth bills?
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Sing it brotha’; I couldn’t agree more!
Here’s my case for full text feeds:
I worship Jon Udell. My opinion of him as a technologist and as a person couldn’t be higher. Still I don’t read his blog that often - probably less than weekly. I read a lot of less-worthy blogs on a daily basis.
Why? Because his feed isn’t full text. I have a mental block from even checking his feed for new content. A partial-text makes me stop and think about each post “Click or skip?” Full-text lets me plow right through.
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:27 pm
jase: If everyone ran 60$/month servers, every site would be down a LOT more than it is. Our servers run us 250$/month right now, and that’s pretty cheap.
Also, at 17$/day, that’s a hefty bill for ONE mildly trafficked blog. Now imagine content producers with 20 Scoble’s, and all of a sudden you’re in the 400$/DAY range (12K/month).
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Ignore my math, I misread your sentence. Still, the point is the salient. Scoble doesn’t really have that much traffic. Also, what would Scoble’s feed look like if it had images in every post (as more and more blogs are doing). Instead of 30K Gzipped, it’d be 300K. And all of a sudden you’re talking different figures entirely (especially if, instead of 10,000 subscribers you have 50,000 or 500,000).
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:38 pm
“Mike: some feeds I want partial, some I want full (most I want full, though, even on my smart phone).”
But you said you wouldn’t subscribe to ANY partial feeds. More than once in the post, in fact. So which is it?
And is Tech.Memeorandum destined for the scrap heap? Or are they sending out a full feed that I am unaware of?
Just asking, carry on.
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:43 pm
For just file serving you don’t need a fancy server, for high traffic sites you really should be caching your content and serving it from a separate server.
I’m guessing that is why comments often dissappear for short periods here on WordPress.com as the caching mechanism must have a few kinks in it.
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Ethan: on my desktop machine I don’t subscribe to anything but full. I won’t subscribe to anything that doesn’t at least make full feeds available (and haven’t, if you look at my NewsGator feed list). But, on my cell phone I can set NewsGator to only display partial text feeds. So, I have a choice.
Jeremy: I use a free blogging service. Maybe if the costs are too high for you you should consider a free service like Blogger, MSN Spaces, WordPress.com. :-)
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:21 pm
You will also be giving away your content to hundreds of splogs around, that will make money of your hard work, since these days lots of the scrappers get better listings on Google and Technorati.
No to full listing!
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:22 pm
I was at IT@Cork (the tech session after lunch) when you asked how many people used RSS aggregators - maybe you would have got a bigger response than 2% if you had asked ‘how many published content with RSS?’.
The low response might be connected to simple time pressures. Frequently updating feeds on an aggregator and reading through them all can be low on the to-do list when there are so many other demands on time.
We could do with a 26 hour day over here.
I don’t have strong opinions on the full/partial feed argument, but I do think that RSS will only become widely popular among casual internet users (who don’t work in IT) when an aggegator is included as standard (not a plugin or third party add-on) in Office.
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Robert: What are you on? Move to WordPress.com? And give up all control, all advertising, all our custom applications, all syndication control AND be subject to someone else’s downtime?
That’s the stupidest thing you’ve said in this thread. Would that be your recommendation to the NYT too? Move their services to Xanga?
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Also, Scoble, you get perks with your free blogging service that no other user of WP.com gets. Like your own template. And Matt’s cell number.
We couldn’t PAY someone to give us the service and customization we require. And we tried, we worked with the Yahoo folk for over 2 weeks trying to make it all fit and it just didn’t. We, as a growing content business, needed more than Yahoo can give. And you think MSN Spaces is somehow going to work?
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Hi Scoble,
I’m using Bloglines.I set it to complete entries on your subscription, but it still shows a few lines…perhaps it could be a setting in WordPress? I checked Dave Winer’s feed at scripting.wordpress.com and that works fine.
I love the article about growing your blog audience. Going to give it a go. :)
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Partial or full? Why does this always pop up as a hot topic?
It doesn’t matter one iota if you’re talking about “protecting” content or increasing/reducing readership. It all boils down to what you like to read and how that material gets to your screen. Do you like to have it there waiting for you? Or would you rather only retrieve the items you really want to read?
Keep in mind this discussion is about human preferences. From an automated sense (i.e. what your rss reader can offer), big deal… as long as the feed has a back to the parent document, the full content is retrievable. It takes a fraction of a second for a program to pull the url from the link element and request the document. Done - the content is retrieved.
For an honest application, this means the content is placed alongside the feed’s item so that the reader doesn’t have to click on a link to view the entire article. As an example, my rss reader, intraVnews, does this exact same thing. I subscribe to a wider variety of partial feeds - some of them I prefer to leave them as partial, for others that I historically enjoy reading the full articles I simply instruct intraVnews to retrieve the full item. If your reader can’t download a full item, get a new reader… don’t take it out on the publisher, though.
On the flip side, this automated process in the hands of the less honest is a problem, but that is a problem that is defined by the RSS protocol. If you publish information and contain a link to a parent document, the process of cloning content is a no-brainer… partial or full rss feeds are effectively no different (unless your parent documents require authentication to access, but that is a different issue altogether).
February 22nd, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Jeremy: I agree. It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that anybody but personal blogs be hosted on free blog services. Companies need their own identity. I’m going to take a wild guess and assume there is no chapter in Naked Conversations that suggests Apple move their site to apple.typepad.com or myspace.com/apple. They could take their files and serve them from a free file hosting service and use Yahoo! to host their online store. Then Apple will never have web costs again! No, if a chapter like that exists in Naked Conversations, then the entire book’s relevancy is down the toilet. And be aware Scoble, that is exactly what you just suggested. Consider it blogged: http://www.richbrownell.com/page.php?id=198
jaseone: There are sites that get bills that high. TWiT is one of them and their RSS is already served from a separate server. You are underestimating how many hits RSS gets.
On a related note, the Mix 06 RSS is partial text. I guess Scoble doesn’t want like-minded individuals to attend.
February 22nd, 2006 at 4:23 pm
[...] Performancing have written about Why Full Text Feeds are Good - having been inspired by Scobles post explaining why Blog Herald not understanding why full text feeds work. I won’t summarize their opinions - go and read the posts for yourselves to be better informed. Pay special attention about what Scoble has to say about influencing connectors and journalists. [...]
February 22nd, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Some Like It Partial: The Full Vs. Partial RSS Debate Continues
Read Robert Scoble’s thoughtful explanation of his disdain for partial RSS feeds. Scoble says he won’t subscribe to a partial RSS feed - one that displays only the first part of each post ("except for my brother’s blog," he admits).&…
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:20 pm
[...] Robert Scoble today spelled out the advantages of full-content feeds. His argument goes like this: [...]
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:44 pm
good discussion with valid points all round in my opinion.
In an ideal world I’d make my feeds full text every time - I see a lot of advantages in it even though I prefer to read partial feeds in my news aggregator (and I set them to only show me a title and first paragraph or two so I can scan them).
However, every day I find another splog using my feeds to generate content for their blogs - quite often with no attribution and no links back. At least with partial feeds they’re only publishing my first paragraph or two.
The other element I’ll throw into the mix is that if your content is good enough and you give people a reason to read your blog - they will.
This is illustrated by Robert following his brother’s blog - he wants to know what he’s got to say to the point he’s willing to go out of his way to do so.
I find this is the case on my blog with some readers who tell me that I am the only partial feed they follow. Yep I’ve obviously lost some readers like Robert, but I guess that’s a risk I’m willing to take. It doesn’t seem to have hurt me so far :-)
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:26 pm
the length of this post is reason enough to have partial feeds. Yawn!
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:34 pm
I view partial feeds much like the 3 line preview of messages in outlook. If you don’t get my attention with the first 3 lines of your email, I don’t open it. I likely delete it. If you get my attention with the partial feed, I’ll click through and read the rest..and voila! I’m now at your site, and if you’ve done things right you probably have me hooked. And isn’t that the goal? At least for commercial sites?
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:40 pm
[...] Lots of debate today over the good old ‘full feed vs partial feed’ question. Robert Scoble responds to a post by Duncan Riley who accuses Steve Rubel of ‘not getting it’. Kent Newsome say’s that Steve ‘Does Get it’ and Nick Wilson agrees with Robert. [...]
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:27 pm
[...] Both Robert and Alex recently posted about bloggers who are using partial content feeds and how it can be frustrating to the reader. I agree completely and I’ll give you a real world example of how it can be a danger to your business. [...]
February 22nd, 2006 at 10:31 pm
[...] Scoble On Full Text Feeds - I’d suggest if Duncan believes in partial feeds its because his business is in getting you to visit his site. I much prefer full feeds thankyou. [...]
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:08 am
When you make a bold statement like “Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work”, you imply that all full-text feeds actually “work” and earn ad revenue, which of course is total nonsense. They may do so in the future, when someone comes up with a way to either successfully monetize full-text RSS feeds, or manages to make their site sticky despite offering full-text feeds.
And by the way, I won’t subscribe to any feed that isn’t partial-text :) I much prefer to browse, then get the full effect of the corresponding website. Except I keep envisioning something that might be out of some Blade Runner kind of world: an RSS reader that sequentially “plays” 3D holograms of stories.
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:12 am
Hey Bobby, here’s some real numbers based on a vertical community/information site with 250k uniques a month serving just over 10 million pages. It’s soley supported by advertising revenue, mostly from an in house network with a bit from Adsense that grosses well into six figures a year. For a while they used RSS to distribute feeds for the forum (which many of them are sort of blogs) and current news/feature content. During that time the feeds were offered, page views didn’t seem to decrease, impressions didn’t seem to decrease and CTR didn’t seem to decrease and conversions on the target advertiser’s sites didn’t seem to change. No one really seemed to care though some people used RSS the to keep an eye on the forums. The forum content was also available via email updates and NNTP. No one really used NNTP, some used RSS and many more used email, by a factor of 5 times or so compared to RSS.
Leaving the RSS on wasn’t a big deal, until one thing. An advertiser that was responsible for about 20% of the revenue plus a pretty big chunk in the parent corps trade mag of similar content started asking questions. They didn’t seem to like it or get it that the content was being provided, in full without the ads that they were specifically targeting for that content. It was decided that until the staff had a chance to start shoveling the advertiser’s rich media ads into the feed, they’d stop the feed for the time being.
My point is this Bobby, it’s pretty easy for you to dismiss people not using full feeds, or not providing any feeds when you don’t have to make a living selling ads on your site having to appease both media buyers and community members. Your site is not selling impressions and eyeballs and the people that run the site I mentioned had to decide on enabling a feature that hardly anyone in that community uses vs. generating some disdain from the people actually sending in the cash. It ain’t all about you, babe. A business needs to make decisions based on what they know and how they feel, not on what some techno pundits think that don’t have a financial stake at risk. The choice of having to risk 10’s of thousands in revenue vs. not being linked by a third party that does not contribute to the revenue stream is a pretty easy choice to make.
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:23 am
Jeremy, just one thing: the people of Cork would be surprised to learn that you believe they are part of the UK.
February 23rd, 2006 at 1:11 am
WOW, The debate is hot and heated.
I think the one thing that publishers should be aware of is the user experience. As a publisher of content I would want the user to have the best possible experience so I would always recommend publishing full feeds for this reason.
You have to understand that many publishers have no desire whatsoever to monetize their content in the traditional advertising model form (PPC or ads).
Perhaps the publisher makes thier money by delivering quality value added content to their user base or target customer base. The readers become evangelist, or extends the WOMM (word of mouth marketing). The customers become more loyal…etc…they increase sales.
Publish full content and extend the brand and don’t try to make a dime from advertising is a model that works for many businesses. They let everyone syndicate the full content.
This is why a full RSS Content Delivery Strategy needs to be designed before businesses start blogging to make sure they can deliver what the audience wants.
My vote is for full feed content.
Rodney Rumford
http://leveragedpromotion.com
February 23rd, 2006 at 2:44 am
Full vs partail feeds war erupts once more - yawn!
Duncan at the Blog Herald has ignited his twice yearly war on full feeds (here’s his previous attack on full feeds). Duncan is taking a new tack on the argument this time saying that you can’t make money by giving away your content in full…
February 23rd, 2006 at 3:07 am
[...] I’m not going to re-hash the arguments now, Robert Scoble has argued the case for full feeds far more eloquently than I ever could: What people who say that full-text RSS hurts their advertising possibilities don’t get is that if you treat connectors, bloggers, journalists better, you’ll get MORE audience to your Web pages, which will get you more advertising hits. [...]
February 23rd, 2006 at 4:20 am
[...] Scobleizer » Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work (tags: rss ads) [...]
February 23rd, 2006 at 8:29 am
Robert Scoble on full text feeds
If you’ve read my brother’s blog much in the last few years, you know how much he doesn’t like partial text feeds.
Today he did another blog on why he feels that partial text feeds are bogus and why he thinks that arguments that publishers make to s…
February 23rd, 2006 at 8:35 am
[...] Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work [...]
February 23rd, 2006 at 9:04 am
[...] Based on these reasons going on over on the Scoblizer, I really think the way to go is to do partial text on the web, and full text on RSS. In this way, you tailor your content for the medium, as they are both very different. [...]
February 23rd, 2006 at 9:29 am
“too full of smart people”, I think you mean too full of self-absorbed arrogant people.
February 23rd, 2006 at 11:23 am
My Mom uses RSS and Scoble’s mom doesn’t
Point is, she uses it, and it makes her life easier. We have about 16 blogs in the extended family. RSS helps her keep up. RSS is on its way to mainstream, even if the Scoble family is still a bit technologically backwards :)
February 23rd, 2006 at 11:30 am
I don’t have time to read all the comments or the entire post but let me just say that using full text over partial feeds gives you a duplicate content penalty in Google if a news aggregator copies your text. This eventually pushes your weenie blog down into supplemental results in the search engines (mainly google) where you suffer, never getting your head above water. If you are not a weenie blogger you have “authority” which allows you to go forth and prosper in the engines. The main reason partial feeds have to be used by the rest of us Robert. I know, most people do not care or notice this stuff…
February 23rd, 2006 at 2:06 pm
[...] A couple of days ago, Robert Scoble posted this argument, arguing in favour of full-feeds and against a post made by fellow-Australian Duncan Riley, who has consistently argued in The Blog Herald that you can’t build a blog business using RSS feeds. [...]
February 23rd, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Robert,
I am not going to slog through all 91 comments, but it seems that no one has yet made the observation that distinishing between aggregators and browsers may prove meaningless with time. We already see beginnings of integration in browsers like IE 7 and Firefox.
There’s also integration coming from the other direction. My current RSS reader of choice is SharpReader, your typical tri-pane MDI app. The lower-right pane is the expected blog web page itself. You are reading this comment written in that pane. In fact, the third pane is simply an instance of IE. I often use it to tweak my own blog after emailing an entry in (MSN is still clueless about what to do with that burst of Word formatting data at the top of each entry). I’ll also link off a blog page to follow up something without leaving the pane.
I therefore reject the thought that the future of RSS is an either/or proposition. Indeed, I think aggregators and browsers have to merge if we want people like our mothers joining the audience pool.
February 23rd, 2006 at 7:05 pm
I’ve been debating the full-feed / partial feed thing myself. On one of my sites, I decided to use partial feeds because quite frankly the feeds on that particular site weren’t targeted at people using newsreaders. What I was aiming for was other websites picking up the feed and displaying my headlines, all of which link back to my website. And with the feed only being there a couple weeks, I already have websites displaying my feed on their websites.
When you talk about feeds, you seems to assume that the only consumers are people using newreaders. In many cases, the consumers are other websites publishing your feed.
February 24th, 2006 at 8:44 am
[...] But Robert Scoble did a great piece on why it does indeed suck, even for those who want to make a buck (or quite a few) with blogging. Main idea: [...]
February 24th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Aside from the great reasons you gave why full-text feeds are better, they’re also the *only* type of feeds that can get subscribed to BlogBurst:
“Blog Requirements:
* Full text syndication feed in RSS or Atom; most common blogging systems will work fine”
February 24th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Excellent post but I think there is another reason that Companies and users don’t always like full feeds and that is branding.
So I put up an article on my blog about it:
http://blog.timc3.com/archives/297
February 24th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
The bigger conversation around clipped feeds of interesting information makes you click through.
I use RSS to gather information quickly about topics that are business and interest driven. If I have to click thru then I’m wasting time.
Another thing about full feeds I can tell pretty quickly if I need to read the rest of the post or not.
February 25th, 2006 at 8:54 am
One problem with full feeds though is other websites can now reprint your entire article for free on their website and users never have to click through to your website. Its an easy way for competing websites to steal content.
Imagine if news organizations all published full feeds? Their news would appear on tons of websites and people would never have to click back to the news website. Imagine how much money these news websites would lose in advertising when people no longer have to visit their website to read the news.
This more applies to non-blog websites publishing RSS feeds, though, but it would still be a concern for blog websites. Full feeds are NOT just used in feed readers by techies, they are also used on third-party websites to provide content from outside sources.
Although this could be used as an advantage if that was your goal. If your non-blog or blog website published an RSS feed with the entire article, you could encourage non-blog websites to published a automatically changing syndicated column on their website using XML-to-HTML and RSS technologies. You would just have to make sure that there were branding and links in the article itself to insure that most websites would still link back to you. Unscrupulous websites could still scrap your name and link and branding off of it, but most wouldn’t.
So if you published full feeds, be aware that it might just appear… in full… on someone else’s website. If that’s okay with you, publish a full feed. It could be an advantage if you brand it and provide links to your website.
February 25th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Thanks Scoble. This is some really good data.
February 25th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Another Round of Partial vs. Full Feed Debate
Another round of the debates about full-text vs. partial text RSS feeds has begun. Robert Scoble still insists that full-text RSS feeds can be of benefits to both publishers and subscribers. Nowadays, he won’t subscribe to partial feeds. Nick De…
February 25th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
[...] Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work (tags: blogging rss) [...]
February 25th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
[...] Tris Hussey makes some interesting observation about Robert Scoble’s views on full or partial RSS-feeds. Without going fully into each article, I believe that fukk or partial, ultimately, if one is to make money from a reader/viewer, marketeers need to respond to to the needs and motivations of that individual. [...]
February 28th, 2006 at 5:18 am
RSS: Don’t Stick Your Head in the Sand.
Like most weeks, there always seems to be some hot topic in the blogosphere and last week was no exception, with a big hoo-hah about how RSS are more pointedly Full Vs Partial Feeds. I am not going to get into the debate on which is better, I have my p…
February 28th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
[...] Have you fought with your spouse over whether full-text feeds can be monetized? [...]
March 1st, 2006 at 7:15 am
[...] Tris Hussey makes some interesting observation about Robert Scoble’s views on full or partial RSS-feeds. Without going fully into each article, I believe that fukk or partial, ultimately, if one is to make money from a reader/viewer, marketeers need to respond to to the needs and motivations of that individual. [...]
March 5th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
To feed or not to feed, that is the question…
For a few months after I started this site, I kept the original partial feed. However, I didn´t like the way the articles were displayed (especially the links in the beginning), so last month I decided to change to “titles only” mode while at the sa…
March 7th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
[...] Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work [...]
March 8th, 2006 at 4:31 am
hi scoble,
regarding the full text feed, i wonder whether the settings on your wordpress blog has it set….to that. Under options…in the dash board under reading you have the option for full text or summary.
March 8th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
[...] Not sure if you’ve been following the semi-heated debate between full and partial RSS feeds over at Microsoft Geek Blogger Robert Scoble’s site, but it’s seems everyone’s got an opinion on the matter. Especially Duncan Riley. I can see both sides of the coin but I thought I’d chime in with my own case for the partial feed with the image below. I think this might even sway Scoble himself. :) Enjoy! [...]
March 8th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
I totally think full feed is the way to go. What’s holding us back is the old mindset. I blog about this here:
Blog content ownership and control
http://reblogger.wordpress.com/2006/02/08/blog-content-ownership-and-control/
FeedFlare - building longevity into blog posts
http://reblogger.wordpress.com/2006/03/01/feedflare-building-longevity-into-blog-posts/
In essence the change over will come if we design and change the way we think so that we accept permanent ownership of the post by the creator and earns for the creator for years afterwards (unlike artwork where the item leaves the creator and never earns for the creator again).
As long as we design for this, by retaining a connection with every copy of the post - no matter where it goes, for how long or how it is used - then we will have resolved the problem people have about giving out full feeds.