followup: Truncated RSS Feeds Kill Conversations and Long Term Traffic: Technology Evangelist

Chuqui 3.0.1 Beta: Truncated RSS Feeds Kill Conversations and Long Term Traffic: Technology Evangelist:

So, I want to toss this out. Once you decide you really need to monetize that feed, what’s the way to do it? I personally dislike ads in an RSS feed, but if you do a full feed, you strongly discourage feed readers from clicking through o where the advertising is.

I’m not sure which option I prefer. Or more correctly, dislike least.

got lots of good feedback here — thanks.

The answer seems to be there’s no really good answer, but it seems clear people (at least those that care enough to discuss the issue) would rather see ads in the feeds than truncated feeds.

Looking at the usage patterns of the site with feedburner and google analytics — total content readership is around 500 visitors a day, and that breaks down to just about 50% coming in via search engines, 30-35% reading the feed (or clicking in from the feed to read — but very little of that, with a full feed), and the rest via links from other sites.

If you only advertise on the site, and 1/3 of your readers only see the feed, the rest are subsidizing those folks.

I think we can take away a few data points on this…

First — full feeds matter. The feedback was clear: truncated feeds just don’t fly for the core readership.

Second — that’s a lot of advertising views being left on the table.

Third — there’s some thought out there (and I’ve done it myself) that a blog design doesn’t matter as much, because “everyone is reading it in the feeds”. In reality — a huge percentage of your viewing is done out of the archives, and from links and search engines. For those folks, the design really DOES matter — and I’m willing to bet a key component of them deciding to stay and subscribe. So don’t get into the mindset of thinking it’s all about the feed.

So, I am definitely staying with the full feed; when I find a feed advertising solution I like that isn’t obnoxious, I’ll experiment with it. Not right away, though. But I’ll keep this in my planning.

Having said that, though — I am still considering using an excerpt/truncated model for some material; I’m looking to start writing longer and more complicated pieces (graphically as well as material) — and I’m wondering whether it makes sense to try to wedge those into a feed. That’s for a future experiment, and I’d expect that cut-off to be somewhere around 500 or 750 words, so at worst it might affect < 5% of postings, probably a lot less. I’ll worry about this later on in the process, maybe experiment with a few pieces and see what the readership is. I think a case can be made that some kinds of articles ought to be read from the site, not the feed, but we’ll play it by ear here.

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