The End of the RSS Full Text Free Ride

If had to pick a single technology that changed my life the most this decade it would be RSS. Phones and computers evolve, surely. However feeds, which I started reading in 2003, were a total game changer. Today I read almost 600 of them. In fact I view my entire reading list as a competitive weapon that allows me to help my company and our clients stay head of the curve.

There are two kinds of RSS feeds - full text and summary feeds. This is a topic that's often debated. Many bloggers syndicate the full text of their posts. In some cases, they monetize them by running ads in the feed. Other bloggers are happy to give away their content sans ads to build thought leadership.

Almost every large media outlet, on the other hand, only offers partial text feeds - also with ads. The reason is they want to monetize your eyeballs twice. They get you with one ad impression in the feed itself and then go for even more if/when you click through to read stories.

In the midst of a massive global downturn I suspect that many advertising-supported bloggers will follow in the footsteps of the larger media outlets and pull their full-text feeds. While none of the big tech blogs has done so just yet, the signs are there that they're perhaps feeling pressure.

Take a look at these screen captures from two great blogs in my Google Reader stream. The first one, from CyberNet News, features a giant banner ad at the top of the feed. For a long time ads in feeds, generally speaking, were really small and unobtrusive - no more. The image on the the bottom, from Googling Google, is a sponsored post that appears in the feed.

If online advertising should continue to shrink, RSS ads - which have not been exactly been a big winner - will get cut. And this will lead more ad-supported bloggers to start going the way of partial text feeds. Some, however, will recognize that remaining with full text feeds has its advantages. Further, they might be fearful of alienating their readers as other emerging voices happily offer the same news via a full text format.

I would also keep an eye on corporate bloggers. They almost always syndicate full text and have little to gain from traffic. Full text can build their brands. If corporations continue to become digital curators - which is happening - then they may use full text feeds to compete for attention.

Comments

[Adam Singer]

For people making a living from their blogs, sure. But for those of us who write because we love to share ideas, I don't see full RSS going away. I would say many of the best blogs -- or at least many of my favorites -- would probably not stop doing full RSS feeds anytime soon. Just judging by how they view the platform. People like Darren Rowse @ ProBlogger, Maki @ DoshDosh etc...I don't see them moving away from full feeds.

[Steve Rubel]

Agree, Adam. I am talking about ad-supported bloggers. Everyone else will stick with full text. But look at the top-tier tech blogs. A lot of them are funded by ads.

[Grant D Griffiths]

We do full RSS feeds on our blogs and we don't monetize them either. I have never understood why anyone would do partial. In fact, after I have convinced some bloggers to go to full feed, they have seen their readership increase. Perhaps I am seeing this from someone who blogs for the purpose of exchanging information and developing relationships. Not from the point of view of someone trying to monetize a blog.

Blogging for those who are using it to promote or market a business or professional service firm should be doing full feeds. They are exchanging information, sharing information and hopefully building a community. They are attempting to position themselves as "thought leaders" and "opinion shapers." Full feed for that crowd is a must.

However, at the end of the day, how many of our readers truly use RSS. I and I know others get much more traffic then their RSS subscriptions would indicate. I still see a huge amount of traffic as people hitting the pages of my blog. Perhaps as more and more people continue to use RSS, we will see a shift.

Thanks again for a thought provoking post as always. BTW, can't wait until your next great Gmail post.

[Steve Hall]

I can understand serving ads along with a full feed and I can see ad-supported bloggers adding ads to full feeds if they have not already done so. To place an ad in a partial feed as do mainstream media, ahem, Ad Age, or worse, pull a full feed and serve a partial feed with ads is just wrong. It's double dipping.

I see fulls feeds with ads as the typical quid pro quo agreement that's existed between readers and publishers since advertising was invented. I see partial feeds with ads as a lame attempt to further capitalize while unabashedly abusing the reader.

The net: Full feeds with ads is OK. Partial feeds with ads is unacceptable. Partial feeds with no ads is the happy medium.

[Brett Morgan]

I suspect that we may see the ad supported top tier bloggers go the way of commercial journalism. Blogging was, and is, about people connecting directly, instead of by way of intermediaries.

Is the disappearance of the top a good or bad thing? I'm really not sure.

[Darren Rowse]

I'm still seeing more and more bloggers go with full feeds although the trend to big ads above content in feeds is also increasing. In my mind that trend can't be good for retaining subscribers.

All in all I find that RSS ads are still not really earning much. Despite having 150k of subscribers between my two blogs the RSS ads earn $10-$15 a day - pretty poor CPM by anyone's standards.

[Cory O'Brien]

As someone who does all of his reading inside of a feed reader, and as someone who will unsubscribe from a blog if they don't publish a full feed, I hope that this isn't the case.

Instead, I'd like to see more sites publish a full feed, and then if they need to build a revenue stream, do so by monetizing the feed itself through ads, rather than forced click-throughs from a partial feed.

I don't mind ads, and understand that it's part of the game to support bloggers that dedicate their time to writing great content, but that content needs to be accessible in a variety of different formats, so that everyone can access it in their desired way. Closing off content and forcing a single way of intake is just going to turn people away from blogs in general, and is not a direction we should be going in.

If you need further proof, just look at newspapers. They were so reluctant to allow people to read their content online that they stuck with print and only offered a subscription/fee based online version in rare cases. Rather than embrace the new technological movement, they hid from it and didn't learn lessons along the way. Now newspapers like the NY Times are rushing to put their content online, but it may be too late, as the blog has become many people's primary source of news and information.

I just hope that history isn't repeating itself.

[Josiah]

You may have a point, Steve, but I know that I personally hate HATE feeds that aren't full text. It's almost enough to make me unsubscribe.

[Jeff]

I don't know. I ALWAYS unsubscribe from any blog without a full-text feed. Ad supported bloggers also have a very large number of readers, usually found via SEO, that never subscribe to the feed. Heck, they probably don't even know what a feed is. Those are the ones who are going to click on the ads. Savvy net users, most of whom are feed readers, rarely click on ads anyway.

[Adrian]

It's funny that you should mention this... as a blogger and podcaster, I've recently started experimenting with a partial feed on one of my sites... I always used to think that a full feed is the way to go and that if you didn't go with a full feed that you would never get much traffic... Well, there are sites out there (new ones in fact, like Harry McCracken's Technologizer) that seem to be doing just fine with a partial feed.

It got me to start thinking... A full feed has its advantages, however, there is so much more to my sites than just the rss feed and the goal of making an rss feed available is to drive traffic to the site, not to give content away that has a subscriber base that is difficult to size. If the goal is to give the content away in a format that doesn't require a visit to the site, then why bother with the site? Just stick an RSS XML file on a server somewhere and put your content into it. This then raises the question, if only that were done, how successful would those sites turn out to be? My guess is not very. Many sites that provide content via a feed won't get subscribers unless they have a full on site. If just a feed was posted, they would be ignored because they wouldn't have a web presence that you could just visit with a browser on the web, and hence, nobody would trust them. This makes me think that those who demand a full feed are a bit hypocritical. In order to get you to trust us as a content provider (and in many cases even find us in the first place), you demand that we go to the trouble and expense of having a full on web site, but then also demand that we supply a full feed so you never have to visit the said site, and then unsubscribe because we try to encourage you to visit the site to read the content? Obviously it's a bit more complicated than that, but it seems a bit one sided to me.

[Roy Scribner]

I think we'll continue to see traditional advertising give way to the product placement model (reviews, etc.), in which case full feeds will be preferable to summary feeds.

[Diamonds]

I don't think RSS will go away,

As for none full text feeds, sometime you just want to look at the short description before you actually want to read the article. You have to look at it on the sites best interest, they want you to visit their site.

[DC Crowley]

I could live with ads in RSS feeds but not those big and ugly 'cybernet style' ones. I want small ones just like in gmail. If I don't get what I want I'll unsubscribe.