Do you prefer a full view or half? Before you get any naughty thoughts, let me clarify I'm talking about RSS/Atom feeds. As an audience or as a publisher of content, you would know there has been a lot of talk on why full feed access to content is the right protocol. I am just about to debate otherwise.
Being a voracious consumer of content myself, especially from blogs, I subscribe to hundreds of feeds, consuming a variety of content quickly through a single interface -- my feed reader. I refer to this phenomenon as "skimming and skipping" and you will know in a moment why it has nothing to do with milk or ropes.
Many of the feeds you subscribe to are full feeds (allowing complete content access without visiting the site), and many others -- only partial. Teasers with a summary of content, enticing you to click on the story leading you to the main site. No matter how wonderfully tacky that sounded, it has its merits. And it is not to do with being more attractive to advertisers.
If you publish content, there are a multitude of reasons why I would advocate considering publishing partial feeds -- in a U-turn from what is normally advocated. Here are some of the reasons:
1. Less engagement with on-site elements: In my case, the blogzine, ChasingTheStorm.com, has multiple ways to engage -- on the site itself.
- The audience can get access to "related posts" and many other ways to interact with the content by means of plug-ins. Those cannot be utilized at the feed reader stage.
- The sidebars on-site have interesting videos and slideshare documents embedded through widgets. The audience doesn't get to use them if consuming content from a reader.
- The large volume of content usage through readers implies that the time you spent sourcing all that cool multimedia content (on sidebar widgets) is a waste. This also implies you have fewer insights into what kind of content the audience is spending more time on.
2. Too much time analyzing: I use FeedBurner for burning feeds and analyzing feed related data. Though it has interesting stats dashboards, it adds an extra layer of evaluation over and above my existing on-site blog insights tool (Google Analytics). Though I live and love these things, it takes too much time to marry data and come up with a meaningful insight.
3. Limited content insights: Again, many feed pimping tools give stats on 'views' and the 'click-throughs' ( I'm talking 'post centric' stats) -- these are good but not without issues:
- Because you publish full feeds, the audience skims and skips through content. There is no inclination to take any action, leading to lesser click-throughs. Less site visits mean less meaningful/deep insights. Simple.
- Lack of deeper stats leaves the data with limited insights. Time spent, bounce rates, content drill-down and navigation summary data are important to content publishers (Yes, I said 'bounce rates' -- ask me why they might be valuable even for a blog).
- Many people use Google reader as feed reader. And if you use Google Anlaytics, you will probably know that clicks from Google reader are listed under Google.com/referral. Ditto from other Google properties (except search), complicating referral analysis further.
4. Sharing: The audience's ability to forward or share content from a reader is rather limited. Even though many readers now allow this as an optional facility, they are not used often because of the mindset of consuming maximum content in the least time. Skimming and skipping.
5. Comment engagement: Many feed readers do not automatically have a commenting facility from within the reader, also the sheer environment where you are 'skimming and skipping' through content is a barrier to commenting
6. Social proof: I don't burn my comments, which means there is lesser 'Social proof' for people to comment. Often people see other comments and get motivated to comment.
So now you know. It is not about increasing the site's pageviews and getting ad dollars, as is the case made out to be. The logic is not self-perpetuating (serving publisher interest rather than audience interest), rather in actuality it helps the audience in several ways.
Partial feeds elicit better interaction with the blog/publication, better reading environment, the audience gets a better feel of the author's personality, and it just drives an overall more fulfilling experience.
Shalabh Pandey is author of chasingthestorm.com and an independent digital marketing professional in Singapore.
