You might think that making your feed a summary instead of showing the entire post is going to increase your visitors. I think it might have the opposite effect for some.
Let me first say that the reason people use feeds is because they don’t want to visit your blog every day to see what’s new. So if I don’t want to visit your blog daily then why do you think I’m going to click your feed summary to read the rest? It takes a VERY good title or first few lines for me to click through and read more. To be honest I’m more likely to click through and make a comment after I’ve read the entire post because I want to say something.
I’ve already unsubscribed from a few blogs just because I am sick of seeing post summaries every day so it’s not even worth my time anymore. I don’t even get why the option is there because the whole point of a feed is so people DON’T have to visit your website every time to read something.
I would like to hear everyone’s opinion on this.
Don’t be afraid, akisment won’t bite…too hard.
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I actually prefer summaries because I use RSS feeds just for organization and, like a lot of blogs, I prefer to check out the opening, get the overview, and decide whether or not to Read More… with full posts, I still have to scroll through entire posts I don’t care about, so it almost completely defeats the purpose. Again though, I use RSS feeds to keep track of several blogs so I don’t have to visit them unless there’s something I’m really interested in.
Also, I changed all my feeds to summary only to cut down on the scrapers. Before I did, I was really getting hit!
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I was actually considering changing mine to summary a while back to increase visitors but after a month or so and seeing some other people change theirs I realized how much it was annoying me and so I decided against it. I think this is going to be one of those you either love it or hate it deals, and as for me I hate it.
By the way just checked out your blog real quick and you have some really good writing skills and some interesting stuff. I’m not sure if I can subscribe though because of the summary feeds, but you never know…
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manodogs Reply:
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Hahaha! Thanks. Like I said, I am content to leave it set so that readers can change it to their own preferences, but I was getting scraped a lot, so I was forced to change it about a year ago.
If you use Firefox, you can always bookmark it using live feed, which is what I do with blogs I read a lot. But that is really just the title unless you use a plugin which expands it. There are several. I had one installed but had to remove it due to conflicts, but I also gave up on live feeds for most blogs because I have too many bookmarks!
Actually, since this is more your thing, I would love to read a post on some bookmarking utilities and solutions. I am always bookmarking stuff and have so many, I can never find it!
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There are two types of feeds I’ve unsubscribed from – feeds with 30 posts a day and feeds with excessively long posts that do the full text feed. The reason? I use the feedreader to save time and having to scroll through page after page to get to the meat doesn’t save time. For blogs with reasonable length posts, I’d agree with your point, but for anyone whose typical post is more than a few paragraphs summaries might be a good idea.
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:06 pm
True that, I made the mistake of adding Google news feed and had thousands of news the next day, no way in hell I’m reading all that or able to even skim through the titles and find stuff…talk about information overload.
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You’re not the only one. Partial feeds bug the crap out of me. But fortunately, most of the blogs I read publish full. For the partial feeds in my reader, I really enjoy the blogs, so it’s worth my time to click over and finish reading if the first part strikes my fancy.. but for the most part, no, not my thing. You’ve got to be a pretty good blogger, writing about the things that interest me, if you want your partial feed to make it somewhere in my Netvibes pages.
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I feel the same way, only the really important ones to me will I actually click through to read the entire post.
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Feed summaries just get me frustrated even more. That’s why I don’t subscribe to random blogs without actually knowing and understanding the blogger behind the blogs first
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I have mixed feelings about feeds.. it’s great to have the full feed but then there’s the problem of scraping.. does a partial feed actually increase visitors to site?? Has anyone actually ever tested it or is it just theory?
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I’m not sure but I have a feeling it would or people wouldn’t bother.
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manodogs Reply:
October 21st, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I don’t know about that, either. As you said (and I mentioned previously), I did it because of scrapers. I was pulling a sizable amount of traffic for a while and I suddenly noticed a drop, so I checked it out and found TONS of sites scraping my content, so I quickly changed the feed to summary. The traffic picked back up *slightly* but the feed count dropped dramatically, proving most of my subscribers were scrapers.
I don’t think it matters much either way, since a lot of people like to have high feed counts.
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
October 21st, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Although scrapers might suck you will most likely always rank much higher than them in Google anyways so I wouldn’t be too concerned about them stealing your content. Google slaps those sites pretty quickly anyways.
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I prefer full feeds. Some of my favorite sites I read mostly in feed. If I feel like commenting then I’ll go to the site. It’s about convenience. And that’s what I want to make sure my readers have. People who use RSS can be your most dedicated readers. You need to make sure they can get your article to read and not try to trick them to your site in the hopes of getting a click or page view. These are the people who will save or share an article or give you a backlink in one of their posts. The only way I keep a summary feed in my reader is if the content is so good that I just have to have it. And that is VERY rare!
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Yup, my exact words too.
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I prefer full feeds myself also. The reason I have them is so my readers don’t have to return to my site just to read the rest.
I never understood why some blogs do this. When I subscribe to a feed, I don’t want to go to the site. I will go back to the site to put my vote on a poll or comment, but to read it, I don’t want to see it.
Has anyone actually noticed more page views if they do the summary feed with their blog anyway? 8^)
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I actually preffer summaries, my reason to use feeds is to not read everything because honestly few blogs publish exciting content one after the other, so I read the title and the extract and if I like it, ill visit the blog.
Hey it also helps the writter, he or she took time to write for other people, might as well pay him back for the great content with a few visits and good comments. 🙂
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I for one, don’t like feed summaries. I prefer the full feed, so I don’t have to visit the site to read more.
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I am another fan of full feeds. I offer them on my blog because I figure if someone has decided to subscribe to my blog they shouldn’t have to suffer theinconvenience of clicking through just to get the full story. Although a couple of the above comments make me realise some readers prefer partial feeds, is there anyway to offer both?
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
October 26th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
I wonder if there is or should be an option to choose how you view feeds, full or summary.
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If your worried about your feeds getting scraped, you can do something like get a plugin that adds in the most popular or related posts at the bottom of each post. This way if someone DOES scrape you, you are going to get multiple backlinks out of it. There are also other plugins that can help you solve this issue.
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I think that is true. I’m subscribed to a couple of feeds, but I never really look at them like that. Feeds are alright, but not that important as they were before IMO.
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I agree with you on this.
I read most of my feeds on the go with my iPhone and I have have this nice rss reader that imports my google reader rss-feeds to it and shows the feeds layed out perfectly on the iPhone screen…except that when it’s just a summary it doesn’t have that much value anymore… I have to click to see the full post (loading….loading….loading…) and then it appears in the web site layout, which in some cases is really not designed to be viewed on a mobile phone.
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