I Found Another Site To Stay Away From
March 10, 2008
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Rather disappointing if you ask me. While having a look at BloggingZoom’s blogging category the other day I came across a post about a blogger who in three months had gone to 50,000 unique monthly visits, 1500 RSS subscribers, and 1500 email subscribers. Impressive, I thought. I’ll have a look and subscribe to the feed if I find good content.
And you know what? There seems to be some pretty good information. The writer talks about providing value to the readers as being one of the most important things. Sounded good to me, so I subscribed to the feed.
Hey, uh…WTF?!? What do you mean it’s a partial feed?!?!
Well, so much for that. I’ve unsubscribed. It’s as simple as this - if you require me to click through to your site from the RSS feed in order to read the full post, then you’re not providing value to me. In fact, you’re forcing me to expend the most valuable resource I have - my time - just so you can inflate your impressions.
I can already hearing the whining. "But I’ve got advertising on my site. You can’t click on my ads to make me money if you’re not on my site." This is, of course, complete B.S. Run ads in your feed. I’m not opposed to ads at all. There are lots of sites that offer two different feeds - a full text feed with ads, or an ad-free partial feed. Guess which one I’m subscribed to?
I’ve said it before,and I’ll say it again. If you only offer a partial subscription to your feed, I will unsubscribe and never visit your site again until I hear from somewhere else that it’s now offering full text feeds. My time is too valuable to click through to the 100 or so sites whose feeds I follow.
If monetization is your excuse, then maybe you don’t know as much as you think you do. There’s no shortage of ways to monetize a feed. Feedburner will provide the detailed instructions on how to do it. It’s not hard.
One of the best blogging tips you’ll ever get is this - provide full text feeds to your readers. Let them get your content the way that’s most convenient for them. Give them some value. Or are you in this just to make money? Nothing wrong with that if you are. I’m making some money online myself. But I provide real value to my readers - I give them a choice on how they can consume my content.
If that site ever starts offering full feeds, somebody let me know, K?
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content rss
March 10th, 2008 at 5:52 am
In my case not only do I serve a cut feed but also I am a huge advocate of not providing a full feed mainly for one specific reason “Content Scrapers”
The fact is if you provide a full feed, you provide a scraper a full free site for him to built.
In my case I only get scraped a small blurp but I also feed links to get juice back.
It would be great to be able to provide a full feed but in a real world sometimes is not the smartest way to go.
Vic’s last blog post..I’ll be back
March 10th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Vic - that’s a good point actually, and if I was aware of someone scraping any of my sites, I might have a tendency to feel differently about it. Thanks for reminding me of that.
March 10th, 2008 at 7:09 am
I Found Another Site To Stay Away From…
One of the things that I require in a site that I’m going to subscribe to in my feed reader is that it offers a full feed only.
The other day I was reading about a site here on BZ that I thought sounded interesting, and when I checked it out, found t…
March 10th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Yes I also want to say that site scrapers are the main reason I have a partial feed.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:25 am
I prefer a short feed. I’d rather click once through to the site than 10x to scroll down through the reader. A short intro to a post lets me scan more items faster and pick the ones that look interesting.
Now if we could just get that Zoom button on the feed…
Mike’s last blog post..Daylight Savings Time Is A Waste
March 11th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Mike - a zoom button in the feed. That would be brilliant. As for the scanning, I basically read the title, and if that doesn’t make me read the rest I go on. Kind of brutal, but with limited time and lots of feeds, that’s my filter.
Thanks very much for your comment.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I think the content scrapers use more than just feeds. I think some scrape directly from the page on the site.
Regardless, I offer both full and partial feeds and I don’t have a whole lot of subscribers for either. Perhaps if it goes way up, I’ll drop to a partial feed only, if only to defeat content scrapers.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:37 am
Virtually all of the content scrapers who scrape my content publish only an excerpt, but I use full feeds. That isn’t what others are saying above, which is odd…
Personally, I can’t stand partial feeds, and only stay subscribed to a site with partial feeds if the content is exceptional.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:24 am
@RT: I think you’re right. While using a partial feed might slow some scrapers down, it’s quite likely that they’ll just scrape from the main site as well.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:25 am
@Ben: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that some of my stuff is getting scraped as well, but, like you, it’s just excerpts. Weird, but….
March 14th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
I used to feel the same way you do until I saw that a couple of scraper sites were publishing my full posts complete with hotlinked pics. I like the idea of full feeds, but I can also understand why some (myself included) would rather do partial.
jblu’s last blog post..Tools for Aid in Finding Profitable Niches and Keywords
March 15th, 2008 at 9:32 am
I’m actually a fan of partial feeds. I don’t have to wait for the full feed to load, that’s slows me down in reading them. If the headline is interesting the partial feed helps me to decide if I want more and I open all pages I intend to read in the browser. While it’s loading in the background I’m checking out the next feed. It allows me to save time overall with the reading technique I employ. Fair enough I can have 30 to 60 pages open yet in the end its only 30 minutes I spend checking the feeds.
Alex
AlexK’s last blog post..Sorry folks but for the time being, no post
March 17th, 2008 at 6:44 am
@J: Yeah, like I said before, if I knew that I was a large scale victim of scraping I might change my mind on the whole thing. Hopefully I won’t come up against that any time soon.
March 17th, 2008 at 6:45 am
@Alex: That’s a good point, and not one that I’d really considered. Thanks for making me think about that.
March 18th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I am all about the partial feeds, myself. I prefer reading them - same as the other commenters - simply because I can quickly glance through headlines and quick excerpts to find the info that I think is worth reading. Also, content-theft is VERY common, why make it easy for the thieves by offering a full feed?
Joyful Digesting’s last blog post..When You’re Walking Down the Hall and You Drop Sorbitol
March 19th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Very true. I had many conversations about this wtih fellow bloggers. We should display full feeds and leave the choice up to the reader if they want to actually click through and potentially comment or whatever.
So, all and all, I’m not a fan of the cut feeds either!
Jay
DatMoney.com
March 19th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
On my business blog I usually get keyword scraping, usually a 30 word scrap. I actually had a full article scrap on my funny video site where they copied it to the extent that my feedburner tracking was getting stats from their page; they did a pretty good job at getting affiliate clicks :O
Shawn’s last blog post..Naruto Episodes 8 Part 3 - The Oath of Pain - English Language
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I’m not a fan of partial feeds, either, as I do most of my reading from the train. This means that I must download all the feeds to my PDA before going to work, and connecting to the net from the train is not an option at this point.
That said, I can understand why some people are reluctant to release full feeds. Before using Taranga’s Feed Copyrighter, I would see my full post stolen by a splog. That said, after installing the plugin, it seems that splogs only grab the first 50 or so words and then post a link to my site.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s better than the alternative
ジェイソン (Jason)’s last blog post..Silly Rabbit, Blogging Is For Kids!
March 24th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
On my blog some of my posts are partial in the feed are some are full. I had always had full feeds, but now my new theme doesn’t allow it. Any post in the featured side of the page has to be cut off with the “more” tag.
But honestly, now I like partial feeds better. It prevents scrapers, it’s cleaner, and it lets my theme on my actual site look a lot better. You say that the only reason people use partial feeds is to get more impressions - whenever I do this on a post that’s quite far from any of the real reasons.
I also like reading partial feeds, it helps me to get a taste and see if I want to click through. Click once to get to the article, or twenty times to scroll down in the reader?
Tay - Super Blogging’s last blog post..8 Ways to Write a High Quality Post
March 25th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I provide a full feed but I always have a link at the bottom (dofollow’d, of course) that goes back to my blog. That way, if the feed gets ripped off I get some pagerank and a Google alert when they get indexed.
May 27th, 2008 at 1:38 am
[...] I found another site to stay away from (BloggingNotes.net) - First, I’d like to welcome Rod back to the blogosphere after being quiet for a bit. This is an interesting post - I do prefer full feeds to partial feeds, but if you read the comments, you’ll see it’s not as easy a decision as you might think. Do we use full feeds and suffer the consequences, or partial feeds and upset our readers? Let me know… [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 6:12 am
[...] I Found Another Site to Stay Away From - Man, did this one touch off a firestorm. One of the most heavily commented posts on the site. [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Actually, not only do I cut my feeds, but I also link to my page within the first sentence - precisely for the reason of content scrappers. additionally, if everybody can read your story away from your site, who’s going to buy your products or click on your ads?
yahoo web hosting’s last blog post..By: jack
June 4th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I recently learned a pretty neat trick for scrapers…
Most, especially those pulling your feed right in, never ever look at it…place a link or 2 in the first paragraph or 2 and you always have linkbacks to your site even if they do steal it
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Online Free Classifieds - Are They Worth It?
June 6th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Yahoo (folks musta been mad that day, huh) - that’s one of the primary reasons people don’t subscribe to partial feeds. It’s not exactly a secret that most do it in hopes that people will click, and buy….it’s insulting to the intelligence.
The point is, if your full feed content is worth anything, the reader WILL click through after to see what else ya got
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Online Free Classifieds - Are They Worth It?