Full Feed Or Partial Feed? What’s Your Flavour?

I don’t think there will ever be a definitive answer as to whether a site should publish full or partial feeds, but I’m interested to see what my readers think. At the moment this site is publishing a full-text feed, although because I use the ‘more’ tag on just about every post because I like to control how much of a post is displayed on the homepage, articles are also cut off at the more tag within my feed.

Darren’s presented a fairly strong case for full feeds, that I don’t really agree with. Personally I’m a partial feed man. Yes, reading full feed articles is easier but I don’t want to read every article. I’ve subscribed to about 90 feeds so I need partial feeds as it’s easier and quicker for me to process each day.

As a publisher, I also want people to visit my site. I’d rather have the site traffic than the feed subscribers to be honest e.g. I’ve noticed that a lot of sites that have thousands of feed subscribers actually receive fewer visits per reader as a result.

I guess that’s the problem with blogging as there are so many goals to achieve, that don’t necessarily go hand in hand -e.g. more traffic, more subscribers, more money, more inlinks, more comments etc etc.

Where do you stand on this debate? Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to my feed below if you haven’t already