RSS - The Saga Continues

At the risk of this turning into the latest RSS blog, I have been reading the discussion on Scoble's blog about whether to offer full or partial feeds, and a lot of the comments said what I've been thinking since I first came across RSS - full feed will mean less visitors.

A full feed means that it's more likely that people will read what I write. That's good I guess - not much point writing things if nobody reads them. But readers don't equal visitors, and by offering a full feed, I lose the opportunity to slap people in the face with shiny new things I want to show off. Be it a new or seasonal design, a photo of the day, my countdown timer reminding you when my birthday is - whatever it is, you're just not going to see it.

Then there's the comment form - from an RSS reader it's an extra click and several seconds away, and I'm convinced that's a significant barrier that will put people off. Let's be honest, comments are part of the reason I keep going with this sometimes - where's the fun in writing loads and not getting any response? Of course, when I thought about it I realised that if people don't read my stuff they're not going to comment anyway, so I figure it'll balance out in the long-run. But it's not just about the comments.

The focus of the discussion on Scoble's blog is all about advertising revenue, and that applies to my site too. I'm not talking about commercial pay-per-click adverts, but drawing your attention (and hopefully your browser) to new and exciting projects that I put up on the web.

When you open up my site in your web browser, you're seeing what I want you to see. That may sound a bit arrogant, but if I want to advertise something I'm doing, I am free to put up a large flashing banner along the top, a prominent link on the side, or even intrusive flash adverts. Ok, I guess that last one's an argument for full feeds, but you get the point.

If people start subscribing to my full RSS feed, I lose this advertising vehicle. When I release a new project - and if things go to plan there will be lots of them this year - the only way I can tell everyone about it will be through an entry in my diary that will appear in the RSS feed.

You could argue that that's all that is needed, but if you don't read my feed for a few days, the entry is going to be lost halfway down. I could make it a sticky story that hovers in the top three, but that's annoying for the people who have already read it.

And what should I do if I launch a service that would generate most of its income through online ads? RSS is, by necessity and design, a difficult mechanism to advertise through. If I give the content away for free in feeds, how can it pay for itself? Take the current site at yay.org.uk for example - if that was more popular I might sell advertising to cover running costs, but by offering the top ten sites in RSS feeds, nobody would come to the site at all and I'd be back to picking up the hosting bills myself.

Having said all of that, the RSS feed for radiac.net now has the full text of the entries. I figure if I have something special to say, I'm sure I'll be able to come up with a way to draw your attention to it. I've also fixed it so that it validates (hurrah!), and I will follow it up with feeds for comments. After three or four long years in the wilderness, I am finally joining the blogosphere... but this is still a diary ;)

Comments

Meri

I'd argue that you're more likely to get people to visit the site if they are reading all your content, than if you have summary feeds. Summary feeds lead people to open the article in browser IF it interests them. So you're vying for enough attention to warrant opening in browser.

If, however, people are reading all of your content in a full text feed, then mentioning some cool thing you've done will make it more likely that they visit the site and check it out.

I suppose you lose the impact of small incremental changes by having to draw attention to them, but I know that I personally visit those sites I read via full-text feeds a LOT more regularly than summary feeds, in which the first paragraph seldom tempts me to view the entire article.

radiac

I guess that's the point of full rss feeds; people are too busy to go around all the different websites they read, there's no way you can visit 50+ sites a day without seriously harming your productivity. Even with partial feeds that's still going to be a lot of opening browser windows, which is why I gave up on my title-only feed readers.

But if you have interesting content and you make it easily available for people to read, they might just be interested enough to click to comment or see what other people say. They're not going to click if they can't read it.

I think I'll probably understand the problem better if I start using an RSS feed reader, but I can't find any free windows applications that work well for me. So I'm going to get a Mac and try the ones for that :p

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