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Ask YC: RSS Feed: Whole Article or First Paragraph?

7 points by chez17 ↗ HN
I was wondering what your thoughts on this are. If I am giving my site an RSS feed, should I provide the whole article in the feed or just give people the first paragraph and force them to come to my site? Its more bandwidth but its also more advertising views. Is there an accepted convention on this? What are your thoughts?

17 comments

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noelchurchill
I like clicking through to read the article if it's interesting.

It's like having the CD instead of downloading it. You get all the extra artwork and everything that comes with it.

kleevr
As a feed consumer, I actually thought about this too; but truthfully I haven't settled on any preference. Say if I wanted to leave a comment, I'll be heading to the site anyway. But the extra click, when necessary, hasn't aggrivated me at all.

(If you were running your feed through feedburner, you could have ads inserted into the feed as well.)

Oompa
I'm with you on this one. Sometimes it's also nicer since you don't have embedded videos/images load up unless you find the article interesting and wish to click through.

That being said, I know a lot of people that prefer full article feeds, so I would go that route, since I don't know any who would stop reading something if it went from partial feed to full.

silencio
On a sidenote, the embedded videos/images is RSS reader dependent. I like having them load in my reader because I don't get any of the other cruft I don't care for half the time (e.g. comments on TechCrunch...).
silencio
Having partial content (where it would be feasible to provide the full thing) in a feed annoys me because I have to click through not because I'm really interested in leaving a comment, but because I don't even know if it interests me that much because there's not enough information to make that decision. Especially with the feeds that at most just have a link to the full content in the feed (not talking about how it works with feeds from here and reddit and the like, which is something else altogether). It's so much faster to ignore content I don't care for and move on than having to open the link in my browser to do so.

If it's ads that are the problem, by all means, I'd prefer full content with tons of ads to partial content with none.

I usually unsubscribe to feeds providing only partial content, it's only a matter of time and how soon I find an alternative that has full content in their feeds.

rglullis
As a data point for you, I only have feeds that provide the full article.

I take that anyone who is looking for ways to force me to pay extra attention (just to get advertising views) is not worthy of that attention.

sigstoat
i inevitably get fed up with first-paragraph-only feeds. your site is slow compared to data already in my RAM, and i have 184 other feeds to get through.

i don't mind ads in feeds, though. stick it after the first paragraph, even.

(i even prefer getting a summary of the article over getting only the first paragraph, seeing as how most folks like to fill the first paragraph with fluff anyways. see the ars technica feed for an example.)

tptacek
You benefit from partial feeds. But readers hate them. So, are you absolutely awesome? Do you have ridiculous numbers of readers? Then it's your call. Otherwise, people aren't going to read your site.

Freakonomics converted to partial feeds with much fanfare. They lost a lot of readers. And they're Dubner and Levitt. I've never heard of you.

mattmaroon
I certainly gave up when they did that.
mattmaroon
The point of the partial feed is get people to click through so you can hit them with ads. The drawback is that a lot of people just don't.

I'd say that generally the best approach is to toss a tasteful text ad at the bottom of your RSS entries, like Engadget does.

Also, there are other, more engaging ways to get people to click through. Make something people want to respond to in the comments.

rms
Also partial feeds make it more difficult for black hat SEO types to steal and duplicate your content which is bad for SEO all around. I run full feeds but I should really install this plugin because people jack our feed all the time on auto-gen black hat sites.

http://redalt.com/Resources/Plugins/AntiLeech

jamesbritt
Feed readers I've used do not work well for me for reading length posts, so even if the whole thing is in my reader I may click through to the site to have a better viewing experience.

Some folks say they flat out reject partial feeds. That seems like a win for both parties. The host isn't wasting bandwidth sending content to people who don't really care for it anyway.

jws
I thought I preferred single paragraph, and I went to a good bit of effort to code sane "beginning excerpt" extraction code for my feed generators. But now that you make me look at my habits it seems I prefer to get the full feed and then tell Safari to shorten them up. That way all the aggregated articles are similar within my groupings.

Clicking through isn't the issue for me. If it is a lengthy article I'll probably click through to see it as you intended... unless your site is so ad heavy it drives me away.

Now I'll have to go throw away all that lovely code I wrote to do the excerpts.

wataguy
Living in the developing world, as I do, net connections can be pretty flaky and certainly far from ubiquitous. As a result, things work much better for me if I can grab feeds when I have a connection and then read them offline. For me, partial feeds are a pain in the ass; give me a full feed every time. And no, I don't mind ads in my feeds.
fairramone
Personally, I don't bother subscribing to an excerpt feed. I find its utility of little value.

In any case, isn't the net littered with enough AdSense-stained blogs?

Mystalic
Think of your RSS readers and website readers as different demographics with different habits. RSS readers are more tech saavy, easier to piss off, more willing to add or drop you, going to visit your site ONLY when they feel it's worth their time, and more constrained for time.

Basically, they're not the market you want to piss off, and partial feeds aren't going to be tempting for them. You want to keep them happy: Go full feed. I suggest simply finding innovative ways to advertise within feeds!

elad
It depends on whether your blog (or whatever it is that you're feeding through RSS) is meant to achieve.

If you're trying to make money from it through advertising, then the paragraph makes sense. However, your blog better be one of the top blogs in the world if you're to make a living off it, so what's the point. Also, it's clear from the comments here that many people (myself included) are turned off by partial feeds, so that will only decrease your chance of being successful.

However, if you're trying to build a name for yourself or your company, that is - you're the advertiser (of yourself, your skills, your thoughts), and the ads are the blog posts, then it doesn't really matter where and how people read them, and it makes the most sense to provide whole article feeds.