So, as you may or may not have heard, there’s a bit of controversy about publishing full vs. partial feeds. A few very prominent A-listers have whined commented on how they don’t like the inconvenience of going to the actual blog, and one of their commenters likened it to having network television ram down distasteful programming they don’t like.
Well, I’m not sure where you sit on it, but I sit on the “partial feeds” side of the fence.
Here’s why:
1. Page views pays the bills:
While I recognize that some folks like being able to read all of their feeds in their feed aggregator, that’s an indulgence, that, unfortunately most publisher’s can’t afford to … well, for a lack of a better word, indulge. Its possible to insert contextual ads into your feeds, but they don’t pay the bills; for many websites, its the ads on the actual web sites themselves that do. By feeling that you only read the full published feeds, you don’t hit those websites, and you deprive the publishers of trying to pay their bills. Almost like getting the proverbial cow for free, don’t you think?
2. Its not all about the content:
Believe it or not, not everyone uses the k2 or kubrick theme unaltered … some publishers spend time and energy (and sometimes money) developing, tweaking and evolving their blog’s theme. Fully published feeds allow users to bypass all of that carefully tended works of design and art — and for what? I’ll contend that there’s something to be said for wanting to be able to critically read posts on their merits alone — but I’ll also contend that publishers want their readers to get the full “blog experience” (or “brand” if you’d like to use a marketing buzzword) … and that includes all of the colors, fonts, structure, design and layout of their blog. All noticably absent from a naked post.3. Pirates plagiarize by pulling feeds:
Okay — something practical now. There’s a fabulous article over at businessblogwire that handles it better than I … but to summarize, plariagism, much like Shit, just happens sometimes. And the way it happens often does through your RSS feed. Sure, its a tool like everything else; but people have written scripts to scrape blogs and repost their content on other blogs to create filler for them. Think of it as spam + blogs == splogs, where these blogs only exist to gather traffic and funnel them towards affiliate programs and adsense earnings. Employing full feeds allows these scrapers to get at your full posts and plagiarize at will.
At the end of the day publishing partial feeds allows the publisher to exert some level of control — and that’s what its all about. Sure, I know how important it is to allow your community to take control, release APIs of your web2.0 apps and let your fans go buck wild. Yes, I know people want their media when they want it, in the way they want it.
But let’s also play fair.
Most bloggers are either doing it for the love of the game, or if they are trying to eke out a living (or an extra income) they are probably not publishing giants either.
Publishing full feeds is like giving away the cow — why would anyone pay for the milk when you can get it for free? Similarly, why bother hitting up the blog if you can get all of the posts in a single place every day without opening up your browser?
By publishing full feeds publishers are depriving themselves of income, of being able to deliver the full “brand” experience that many of them have worked hard to create, and put themselves at risk of scraping scripts to plagiarize their work.
Selfish? I don’t think so. I’m protecting myself, my blog and the energy that goes into making this blog work. Furthermore, by supporting partial feeds, we’re all supporting the little blogger …
… and y’know what? We all started out little once.
August 31st, 2006 at 2:49 pm | Permalink
The people that click on the ads are NOT your readers. They’re the ones who don’t know enough NOT to click on ads. They come to your page via google looking for spackling generators and lo and behold, there’s a link to spackling generators not in your text, but in the ad column.
If you have regular readers, they’re not going to be clicking on every ad they see on your page. They’re there to read.
Do some tests with your referrals, follow the IPs — the people that come in from google will look at one page and disappear after they click an ad, the people who come in through the home page or from another site will look around and read.
Eventually search engines will be eliminating splogs automatically.
August 31st, 2006 at 3:10 pm | Permalink
Hey John,
Thanks for stopping by.
While I agree that most people who are using rss feeds are probably savvy enough to not really click on ads, they still serve their purpose.
And that is that not all ad networks are PPC but some are still charging by CPC — impressions still count as dollars, and therefore, they still pay the bills.
As for search engines elminating splogs — well, I hope that’s true. Its certainly in the best interest of Google from many perspectives; it seems like only now that Overture — now Yahoo — is catching up with ClickFraud it perpetrated years ago.
I wonder if the splogging that’s happening now will have ramifications in the future for Google; from the publishers that have spent ad dollars for their ads to pop up on splog networks and to have their ads clicked on disingenuously; or from content produceres, finding that their works are on Splogs which are being used for AdSese schemes.
Thanks for the interesting post.
August 31st, 2006 at 6:29 pm | Permalink
Tony, good thoughts. Some blogs benefit most by offering only full feeds, others by offering partial feeds only, and still others by giving readers the option to choose between the two. My company, Know More Media, currently offers only partial feeds for some of the reasons you discussed above. It’s a very interesting question and I think the maturation of RSS advertising will probably complicate the answer somewhat.
Being little is a funny thing, too. Technorati says I’m somewhat big in my niche because a few hundred blogs have linked to mine in the past six months. But my blog only receives a few hundred page views a day. Part of the link popularity is due to my subject - professional blogging - and part of it is due to my being in a network of several dozen blogs that link automatically to mine. In other words, I’m much littler than I might seem at first glance. It just amazes me that a blog can seem much more popular or heavily-trafficked than it really is.
August 31st, 2006 at 6:55 pm | Permalink
Mr. Ellsworth — thank you for dropping by. ;)
(long time fan)
I think that from a *reader*’s point of view full RSS feeds are understandable. In this day and age, I certainly am more cognizant of how powerful the consumer is — and how the tastes of the internet are an evolution of that.
Sadly, however, something needs to pay the bills; and for many small time bloggers, adsense helps with that. Its funny how there is a distinct distaste amongst the digerati for ads — see “21 Ways to Attract Traffic to Your Blog” … under “Eschew Advertising” — first sentence: “I hate Adsense on Blogs”.
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1347
At any rate, its interesting how you mention RSS advertising; i’ve seen it on some (http://www.crate.com for example) but not a heck of a lot of other sites.
One wonders if there will be a similar ‘distaste’ (backlash?) if RSS advertising ever hits a ‘tipping point’ with a critical number of bloggers and we see it en masse.
First some were griping about full vs. partial feeds — will we ever see a debate about pure (no ads) vs. polluted (ads) feeds?
Time will tell. ;)
September 1st, 2006 at 1:47 am | Permalink
Windows Vista should help increase worldwide RSS usage quite a bit. That’ll stir this whole pot a lot more.
December 23rd, 2006 at 11:29 am | Permalink
Hi all!!! Cool site!!!