Full feeds or truncated feeds?
There’s always been a great debate about feeds : should bloggers cut them and provide only a few sentences to tease the reader, or should they provide a full feed, containing all the content of the actual post? No later than last week, Eric, one of the most famous french IT bloggers was wondering if RSS feeds were blogger’s enemies [fr]. His point was that, even though his feed counter hadn’t stopped to grow, he notices that his blog reached a level in number of visitors. According to him, this would mean that less and less people bother to click on the feeds links to browse his blog. Eric doesn’t want to cut his RSS, but many of his readers and commenters think that would be the good solution : I completely disagree…
- First, I disagree with Eric : the fact that the number of subscribers to his feed is growing doesn’t mean the number of actual readers is growing. Like any other other service, I guess that many users tend to abandon their online aggregator, rather that unsubscribing from blogs they’re reading… This would then give a number of subscribers artificially high, given the fact that some of these subscribers are not readers anymore. According to me, Eric reached a level where the number of new subscribers is just as much as the number of subscribers that are getting passive everyday. This would even be confirmed by the fact that Eric thinks that he reached a level in number of visitors : 12,000-15,000. I am even tempted to say that this is the actual size of the french IT blog readers market.
- Secondly, I disagree with his commenters when they say that he should cut his feed. Sure, it will artificially increase the number of visitors, at least for a few days/weeks. Then, many readers, like me, will tend to “skip” some of his posts, and then, eventually discard his feed. I personally think that the solution is actually the opposite : give more content ans links in your feeds if you want visitors : your visitors will come because they want to, not because they have to. As an example, I am favorable of putting categories, tags, related posts, the number of comments… and even a little paragraph about the author and/or the blog.
Of course, every case is different, and you should consider all the consequences of such a policy, specially in terms of ads. But, in the end, I am sure that you’ll end up with better ad revenues if your readers are loyal and come to see your content when they want to…
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November 27, 2007 at 4:53 am
[...] les flux pour “appâter” le lecteur. Je été très heureux de constater que mon opinion était proche de celle ...