Full or partial articles in feeds?

Today almost every blog and media website has at least one feed. But some of them prefer to include their entire articles in the feed, while others have only a small snippet or catchy paragraph. The latter ones aim to achieve one goal – by reading the small (and usually teasing) introduction, the person might be tempted to visit the actual page from the website to read the full story.

Before jumping to conclusions, let’s take a look at the details:

First situation: full article in the RSS feed

Most people use feed readers such as Google Reader, or a desktop application that manages feeds from various websites. By reading the entire article using the application there is no more need to go to the original page where the article is situated. The end user achieved his goal with ease. On the other hand, the website lost at least one page view (traffic), which in most cases translates to fewer ad impressions or even clicks and in the end less revenue.

However, in some cases, the user will want to comment on the article, action which would require him to visit the original page.

Second situation: partial article in the RSS feed

Now the user only has a small part of the original article. The skill of the article writer plays an important part here. Using only a short paragraph, he must convince the reader to follow and continue reading the rest of the story on the website. Tricks like rhetorical questions or making unusual statements are meant to do just this. Of course, there is the unfortunate situation when the reader is not convinced that the story is worth reading and the website receives no traffic.

Quick conclusion

As long as the no 1 source of income for websites remains advertising, giving users the full information may not be good practice for webmasters. Also take into consideration that some of your daily readers might have no idea how your website looks like.

I am currently opting for the full posts on my blog. So what’s your position on this?