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 
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Comment by Maki on 15 February 2007:
I remember Robert Scoble mentioning that people are more likely to link to a post if the blog in question was running full feeds. If your strong content is in the middle and end, full feeds will definitely be a great way to promote your post.
Some of my posts start slow but pickup with more heavy stuff so I like running full feeds. Don’t want some readers to not click through just because the opening paragraphs or titles were not entirely interesting.
I think it also depends on your monetization goals. If you’re heavily relying on contextual ads, you’ll need readers on the blog, hence partial feeds will have to do.
If you’re focusing on link selling, affiliate marketing and private advertising, I think it’s more useful to run full feeds in the long run.
Comment by Everton on 15 February 2007:
I try to write my posts like I write memos at work i.e. assume the reader will be as busy as me, so I need to put an Executive Summary at the front so they can get the key facts straight away. I do this hopefully so that I can get their attention and get them to read the full post, and to also counter the need to have to provide a full feed becuase my the summary feed doesn’t provide enough info.
In my opinion your starting a post slow approach is bad as you only have a few seconds to get a busy and fickle reader’s attention
Comment by engtech on 15 February 2007:
I end up unsubscribing from partial feed blogs after a while. Too much of a pain in the butt to read.
Skimming with full feeds is quite easy with Google Reader. You just hit “J” to go to the next post.
If full feeds are hard to skim that’s more of an issue with the feed reading software.
Comment by Maki on 15 February 2007:
I totally understand that.. but what I meant about starting slow is that it presents a summary but doesn’t go into detail on some of the finer points, which might be more relevant and interesting for readers.
That’s probably one of the weaknesses for partial feeds. You can milk an short summary but there’s only so much you can include. Sometimes, it’s a specific hook within the body of the post that really grabs the user’s attention and makes her go, ‘I want to blog something about that!’.
If you only rely your titles and opening paragraphs, you’re giving them an either /or option. Either click through and read more or just forget about the whole post. Sometimes readers are undecided and giving them more juicy content leads to greater clickthrough and link potential.
Partial feeds have only one shot with the summary. If it doesn’t work, you’ve just lost an incoming link and reader for a specific post.
I personally seldom visit other blogs to read posts, because I do it all in the feed reader. Like many others, partial feeds can be very irritating because it’s inefficient from the perspective of a feed reader.
Comment by Everton on 15 February 2007:
I have to admit I do read your posts in my feedreader, but I’d be just as happy to click through.
Everyday I have to really focus on just getting through my feeds as fast as possible, so 99% of the time I only read the titles. I don’t think you can get around having to always try and make the title and the first paragraph ‘punchy’
Comment by Ajay on 16 February 2007:
Full feeds for me. My only problem with full feeds has been sploggers, but I like to give my visitors everything they can read.
However, WP2.1 has changed things a bit. Since I use the more tag on longer posts, the nature of this has changed… not complaining
Comment by Everton on 16 February 2007:
I’m in the same boat with the more tag. There’s a plugin that fixes it, but I’m not sure if it’s a big enough deal to warrant installing another plugin. Plus, my feed readers seem to be going up regardless anyway - nearly double in last week or so!