Free the Feed. Or Make It Free.

I hate your partial feed.

Yes, I've heard all the arguments for partial feeds: they prevent splogging; they ensure people visit the site and generate the precious ad revenue; they keep feed readers from stealing eyeballs.

Sploggers, however, scrape sites any which way they can. A full feed may make it a little easier, but a partial feed won't prevent it. I have one hilarious splog in my bookmarks that scrapes the content, translates it to another language, then translates it back again. So toss that one right out the window.

Ad revenue is another poor excuse. The people who use feed readers are the people who are reading more sites than they can physically visit. The sites that most get the dreaded "mark all as read" from me? Are the ones that have amassed an unbearable number of unread feeds because I lack the time to click through to each entry. So not only are you not getting the ad impressions? You are probably also losing readers, and I'm willing to bet you are losing more comments than you would with FriendFeed as a result. I ALWAYS click through to leave comments on the blog. I don't always click through if I can't figure out if the entry is something I'd want to read in the first place.

There's also the ability to monetize the feed. Services from Feedburner to pheedo allow you to insert ads right in the feed. When you think about it, you have the possibility of even more ad impressions (at least one ad per article) and your readers are more likely to actually read your content rather than just deleting your feed altogether. I wouldn't recommend trying this with a partial feed, however, but if you'd like an example of a complete nuclear fail, you can always subscribe to Apple Insider's feed. They give you a partial feed AND serve ads in the feed. Guess what Apple site I don't subscribe to?

Still not sure it's what readers want? J. Phil of Scribkin shared a link to a year-old post at EchoDitto Labs with a hack to create a full-text feed out of most partial feeds. You'd think that a post that old wouldn't generate much excitement, but the reaction was unanimous. Of course, the hack strips out any ads on the partial feed, so it's in a blog owner's best interest to free the full feed his- or herself, but I'm sure there are several blog owners who will howl in protest.

Readers want, and expect, help from blog owners in managing the deluge of information they consume daily. The blogs that do that for their readers are the blogs that will continue to enjoy success, and hopefully expand their reader base in the process.