Full text rss = death for blog??
Tim Hibbard enters the never ending argument on full vs part feeds and writes:
“I think it is great that good bloggers get rewarded by ad revenue, but I don’t think the money should drive you to blog. To me, a good blogger shares their knowledge in an entertaining way. Worry about entertaining and educating your readers, the money will be on it’s way.”
Right….and now I’m a full time blogger exactly how am I suppose to make a living if no one visits my blogs because they are all reading them in Bloglines…in full? Perhaps the magical blogging money tree will pay my mortgage?
He also quotes Mike at Simplenomics writing at Duct Tape Marketing:
“”being concerned about your readers sounds noble, but it’s really not…full feeds are really just a slow death for a blog”
Mike also writes on his own blog:
“I’€™m pretty sure I’€™m right about the fact that without clicking thru to the page, you’€™ll never share in the full experience a blogger has to give you”
both fine points. And there is also comments by Mike about “enabling the conversation”, one of the catch phrases that seems to have swept the blogosphere in 2006. I’ve written before about how I use feeds: even full feeds. For each subject area I glance through my feeds on that topic and clicking the scroll wheel on the article I open them in background tabs in Firefox. When I’m finished with Bloglines I then read the posts I want to read. I also read the comments as well, because most good bloggers will tell you that “the conversation”, in this case comments, can be just as interesting, and at times even more interesting that the post itself. Full feeds = limiting the conversation, stuffing bloggermetrics (you don’t know people are reading you if they don’t visit the site), and ruining the chance of many bloggers to earn some revenue to support their endeavours as well.
We’ll that’s my two bobs worth. Feel free to disagree..or agree, and make sure you vote at our new poll on the subject in the nav bars to the right.
Full experience is not Google ads. I will never click on your ads. Full text or die is more like it.
You see the audience which views the full text feed in Bloglines or so is not the kind of audience which clicks google ads. Geeks and Techno-Rated people don’t really have time to click and what’s with the what color is lemon thing?
And Ofcourse, if people like the post they come to comment right. Hope that bloglines does not introduce a comment directly inside the interface, that is the true death of blog revenue.
Full text or die? Is it okay that the blogger inserts advertising to support the full text feed, or are you one who just wants everything to come to you for free?
I don’t mind a partial feed at all. If I am interested, I will click through.
Those that want everything in life for free and think that living in their mama’s basement while she pays their hosting bill will never change.
Those that think I’m gonna change the way I supply my feed are wrong.
This doesn’t even bring into play the splogs that gather your full feed and sell it as their own.
Click thru – enjoy the ride – or don’t.
Some will…some won’t…so what…so who’s next ?
Full text isn’t the death of blogs, it is the death of great blogs. Sure, with full text some people will still write about their new cat or old boyfriend, but those aren’t the blogs people read.
I WANT full time paid bloggers because they can provide a news/information service in a niche which is too small for traditional paper media, not just insight into their feelings about the new ikea livingroom they bought.
People who want full text rss are the same people who copy music, pirate movies, steal software. They want it now and they want it for free, screw the consequences.
If blogging is going to break into the mainstream we can’t all be poor part-time bloggers talking about our 17 cats. There needs to be an acceptable way to become a high quality full time blogger, and full text rss just isn’t it.
the ones who would like to read the full posts in the feeds, use ad-block of some kind :)
I usually visit a blog, if i want to comment..
Mike…you da’ man.
There.
It’s been said.
:)
I’m curious why those pushing for full feeds think telling the site owner that they will never click on his adverts whatever he does will motivate him to pander to them?
Actually I am experimenting with full feeds on one of my blogs right now. My gut instinct is that it will hurt page-views and income, but I could be wrong and there’s only one way to find out.
If you want me to read your blog then you better have a good headline. This is what grabs a readers attention and gets the clickthrough. If you can’t write a good headline that will initiate a clickthrough, you are in the wrong business.
Cary – Thanks !
Eoghann – They’re the same cheap bastards that come into one of my brick and mortar stores everyday looking for something they can’t afford because of their outlook on life. They wake up thinking the world owes them something and rather than participate and work for it…they whine for it.
Chris – you are absolutely riight.
As a blog reader, I much prefer a full-text feed. I hate getting only the smallest of snippets and having to go through the delay of clicking the link, waiting for the page to load, and only then finding out that it wasn’t interesting after all. The bigger the snippet, the more likely I am to stay subscribed to the feed because it’s not a chore to read. I haven’t found any feed that was crucial enough to subscribe to long-term even if their feed was cumbersome. I’d drop them before continuing to wade through a useless feed.
As of income from people clicking into your site, are we talking about CPM or CPC ads here? The fact that more people coming in to read the full-text doesn’t really bring extra income through CPC ads, but only inflats the impressions, which sometimes even has negative effect when things like “smart pricing” kicks in. Regular readers are already ad-blind — just spare them and provide the full feed!
I would think that majority of CPC income would be coming from organic traffic, i.e. those who actually searched the web for ways to spend their money and then subseqently landed on your blogsite…
Feedburner provides you with lots of good stats. It`s full all the way for me.