Does Full Text Lower Your Readership?
I've been playing with the new BlogBeat beta (as best I can tell, you get invited to the beta by complaining that you're not in the beta) and it's interesting to see the traffic patterns with my current very sporadic posting schedule. The big thing I notice is that pretty much every time I write a post, despite the fact that I publish full text feeds, I see a big boost to my readership. These obviously aren't people who check my homepage regularly since they wouldn't know to check the page when I post so they must be RSS readers that have clicked through (BlogBeat doesn't pick up on RSS readership, at least with the way I've set it up).
Perhaps I'd see more readers if I didn't publish full text feeds but I suspect that a great number of people are using their RSS readers to skim posts and pick out the ones they want to read, then those ones get opened in a browser window to be read after all the posts have been skimmed.
Of course to really investigate this I'd need to use something like FeedBurner to track my RSS readership as well and generally I can't be bothered.
On the downside, BlogBeat is pretty clearly showing that my popularity is, to put it politely, pretty good for the long tail. That's okay though, I don't put the effort in to posting regularly and coherently to deserve a big audience - in fact I'm surprised there's this many people paying attention. It would be interesting to see how many read my blog through the various planets that include my blog as well.
September 21st, 2005 at 9:52 am
I don’t read the full text of every blog post that finds its way into my RSS reader. But I don’t read ANY text of feeds that only come in partial form. It’s just annoying. The blurb is often too short, going to my browser is a switch of application and thus of my context, and well, I have an RSS reader capable of rendering HTML content for a reason — because that’s where I want to read that content. If I wanted to use my web browser, I’d use some web based RSS tool.
It’s about choice. Offer a full text feed, and people can stop reading an article when they want. Offer only a partial feed, and people no longer have the choice.
The only reason, then, to serve only partial feeds is because one wants page hits on ones web server. And the primary reason for this, I would expect, is for ad revenue. Well, fair enough, if someone can’t afford to run a blog without supporting it via advertising, they gotta do what they gotta do, but from my point of view, their site goes into the same mental bin as the New York Times: it’s not a unique and special enough snowflake to jump through hoops to catch on my tongue.
September 21st, 2005 at 10:58 am
For once, I completely agree with you. :)