Cartoon: Partial Text RSS Feeds
Some of my favorite blogs and news sites have one huge, grating shortcoming that keeps me from becoming an all-out fanboy: partial feeds. There's a title, a supposedly tantalizing teaser, and a link to read the whole thing. The sites' creators probably hope that will mean readers visit the site, click on ads and generate revenue.
But I've been burned too often by mystery-meat teasers that fall far short of their promise, or that are ambiguously worded and turn out to be about something completely different. So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible -- and that's a bar that's high and rising.
If a newspaper like The Guardian - one where the content is their business-model bread and butter - can figure out a way to make full-text feeds work, then it can't be that tough for the rest of us. Come on, folks - open up the tubes.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Brilliant. :)
So true. CNN.com is one of the worst offenders. Current news items in their RSS feeds simply show the often ambiguous headline and the RSS feed body simply says 'Read full story for latest details.'
An offense punishable by unsubscribing.
For me the issue isn't about making full feeds work, and given I do not run ads on my site, its not about revenue. My site is small and has only a minor following in a very specific area. However, a lot of my content is of a technical nature and is often used as a sort of KB.
I publish only partial feeds because I was sick of getting my content stolen and published elsewhere, then having Google penalise me for it in their search results. I went from a PR of 6 to a PR of 3 because my content was not "unique or original."
So to stop that happening, and to stop others profiting from my own copyrighted efforts, I publish only partial feeds now. I get a good laugh from all the spammer sites trying to profit from my partial feeds.
There is no recourse against those sites, so it was the only thing I could do. Try tracking down the domain owners for most of those spam sites. Even if you do go to their hosting company, they just move the domain and content and carry on somewhere else.
They haven't bothered with something like a scraper yet to go through the XHTML yet. Thats more effort than just stealing content from an RSS feed, but it will get more common when low traffic sites start restricting their feeds more.
Lifehacker is bad for this! It really sucks when on the iphone and you dont want to go the full page
Steve C, I can totally understand you wanting to cut off the air supply of all those scam and spam sites that steal content to make money. I've had issues with that for years at RWW, railing against them at various points in the past. In the end tho I just figured it wasn't worth all the stress and I just ignore that 'ecosystem' of content stealers. One idea for you to consider: at end of each RWW post there is a note (via a Feedburner feedflare) that the content originates from RWW. It won't stop the stealers, but does mean your content is always accompanied with that note about where it originates.
I am surprised to hear you say tho that Google penalised you for others stealing your content. That should definitely not happen and my understanding was that Google can identify the original source of content, so there is no penalty for the content creator. Has anyone else seen that happen??
Yep. If someone wants to steal your content, partial feeds isn't going to stop them. Grabbing the full text is a trivial programming task that is hardly a barrier if they really want to use your content.
Posted by: J Wynia
|
November 9, 2008 3:47 PM
The problem is that most people don't really mind too much, and switching to full feeds would actually cost some of them some revenue. Unless more people complain, we'll either have to put up with it or do without the content.
Ditto - I'm with Steve C on this one. Since I switched to a partial feed only I've had a lot less problems with the scammers and the spam blogs. If people don't want to read my content because it's too much trouble to click on a link then so be it - their loss not mine. I take care to always say in the first paragraph what the content is about.
In the meantime, my subscribers continue to grow in number and most of them know and understand why I have a short feed.
I just use the better google reader script that expands to the full page in an IFrame. Used to be something that pissed me off, now I don't care.
As a reader I have to say I find partial feeds annoying since they force me to interrupt my reading workflow.
However I can understand the authors trying to protect their work.
And as for revenues - put ads in the feed. If I won't click on them in the feed, I won't click on the site either.
About Google ranking issues mentioned by commenters. I've seen people jump to conclusion way too fast, with just one or two data points and without analysis of alternative explanations. Once somebody blamed the tool we are developing for dropping of his blog PageRank and only after a month he found his wordpress actually got hijacked and hidden links were the real reason.
Oh, I love the cartoon btw :)
bye
Andraz Tori
I'm curious how the Guardian makes money from having full feeds, apart from the usual Google Adsense, which provides pitiful revenues.
cheers
Bernard
Bernard, the Guardian announcement indicates they'll be including ads of one kind or another, but only when they're running full-text stories. (They run teasers if they aren't sure they have the rights to publish the full versions.) No word on whether it's AdSense or something else.
Posted by: robcottingham.wordpress.com
|
November 9, 2008 5:43 PM
Great and i think it's ool stuff as user point of view.
http://www.oxyshopping.com
I'd be interested to know what you would then think of having ads placed in the RSS feeds, whether as separate items or within the actual content itself.
For those suffering from the scammers, breaking up the RSS feed either with ads (either as separate items or within stories) which use your own affiliate numbers or something else which means they would have to manually check them could be a way to make them give up, cause hassle to them or potentially increase your revenues if they can't be bothered to try and remove them in any way.
Alex Trup
Amen! Seriously, it frustrates me to no end when feeds are just a snippet. It misses the point (and beauty) of a feed.
The thing is, if they're worried about ad revenue, there are plenty of methodologies at this point to get ads into a feed (even painlessly).
I don't think ads in RSS feeds are such a good option from revenue standpoint. So, guess its okay for sites to publish partial feeds. If the partial snippet is lousy, i'm not gonna click it either.
I actually prefer to read partial feeds. In some RSS feeds, it takes ages to scroll through the full text entries.
I use to be an absolutist when it came to full feeds as well, until I fell into my own use case for partial feeds.
75% of the subscribers to my local community site (http://cambridgevoice.ca) use the email option rather than RSS. The email is created from the RSS fed (thanks FeedBurner!) so if I use full feeds, the emails are HUGE.
This single use-case, though, doesn't excuse the majority of partial feed publisher that have no good reason to force readers to their site.
Rob, after reading your article and many of the comments, it is interesting to see that the debate on full vs. partial feeds continues on. Many of my blogging friends have changed over to partial feeds primarily to drive traffic to their site.
I am still on the fence with this one. It is not so much a matter of profit for me, as it is knowledge and direction.
Google rewards some of my cornerstone posts, but I find it hard to really know if a new topic I'm experimenting with takes off because people often consume, and do not reciprocate with feedback.
While this does not bother me, I do wonder if it would make it a bit easier to track whether particular subjects hit or not.
However, my vote has been to retain the full feed features as it is more convenient for my readers... and for now it is more about them than me.
Just as Andraz said, partial feeds interrupt the flow when reading feeds. Often, it's tough enough to find time to stay current with feeds, but when the authors make it even harder to do so, I'm inclined to simply unsubscribe and devote my limited time to sites that don't impose barriers.
And I try to return the favor by visiting sites and leaving productive post comments on blogs that I subscribe to. I consider that to be a vital part of being a good netizen and a considerate blogger.
Some great conversation here -- thanks, everyone (and Andraz and Zee, thanks for the kudos on the cartoon).
I feel the pain of folks like Katherine and Steve who've had their feeds ripped off. It happened to us at Social Signal (we had a little fun with the people doing the stealing, actually), and prompted us to do the FeedFlare thing Richard suggests. It didn't stop them, but it fingerprints our content and gives me a little visceral satisfaction.
BTW, Colin, have you thought about creating a separate partial feed, and letting people subscribe by email to that one?
Ken's is the point that makes me wince, though, because I don't know of an easy way to comment on a post via an RSS reader. (I'm braced for the deluge of "What? You didn't know about FlegmarNewsFeedCommenter?!" replies -- fire away.) And on that note, a hat tip to Rob O.: I love the idea of feedback tithing as the gladly-paid price of reading a blog.
Posted by: robcottingham.wordpress.com
|
November 10, 2008 10:56 AM
Couldn't agree more. This annoys the heck out of me!
There are a few different advertising options within full content feeds, and we'll have to see what advertisers like best and how people respond.
But direct revenue is only part of the issue.
There are other tangible benefits to full content feeds like loyalty and engagement. And then there are strategic benefits around openness and becoming useful at the data layer of the Internet.
This is one of my major pet peeves. I think what gets me the most is that I'm using a feed to aggregate content and go through it quickly. I use Google Reader so I can email or share when something looks interesting.
I don't use a feed so that I still have to go to another website to get content, and now one wants to email just a snippet of a blog post or article to someone who might be interested.
Those who use partial feeds, in my opinion, are doing so to get the direct links to their site, which means that they've prioritized getting a direct link to their site over the value of the content they're trying to deliver in the first place.
As tempting as another link may be to my blog, I value my readers' time and workflow, and want to deliver useful content to them in the way they can best digest it, which is (usually) full feeds.
Kate