Early on in Casual Kitchen's life, I found some instances where my content was "scraped" (lifted and recast on another site without credit or links). Seeing that made me want at least some way to limit the automated theft of my material, so I switched CK to partial feeds.
I want my readers to get as much value as possible from Casual Kitchen, and so I am asking you to weigh in on this issue by voting in the poll below. Just tell me how important (or unimportant) full vs partial feeds are to you. It will take only a few seconds.
If you have any additional thoughts on this issue, please share them in the comments section, and thank you for participating--your opinion counts!
Also, if you're curious about the "feed question" from a blogger's perspective, here's my personal list of pros and cons for using full versus partial feeds.
Partial feeds: Advantages:
More control over my content
Credit for all pageviews
Feedreading subscribers can see the title and enough information to decide if they want to read the content
Partial feeds: Drawbacks:
Subscriber loss: Some readers will not read any blog unless it allows full feeds
The required "extra click" seen as annoying to some readers
Full feeds: Advantages
More convenience for readers (unless today's poll shows otherwise...)
Search has grown to more than half of my traffic, those readers don't come to me via a feed at all
Full feeds: Drawbacks
Very difficult to monetize content distributed via feeds
Loss of control over content
Can be victimized by automated plagiarism via scraping
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11 comments:
I absolutely have a preference for full feeds. In fact, though I sometimes subscribe to sites that offer partial feeds, I usually find that I wind up deleting them after a few months because I can't reliably read sites I have to click through on each post to view the content. That may be an indication more of me than of your general readership, but I for one definitely appreciate the full feed. :)
I do the same thing as Erica - sign up for a blog, realize I never click through to read the article, and then delete the feed. I only really click through when a post catches my interest enough to comment (like today).
Please, please, please continue giving your loyal readers full feeds!
CK is one of my daily reads, but I often read it while I'm on the bus or out and about. Using my google reader to capture the RSS makes it possible for me to read your whole (and wonderful!) column even when I'm in a place without wireless (like on a bus or a plane).
I have found that when blogs move from a full feed to a partial feed I tend to stop reading them, and I have been removing them from my RSS feed. Since I have to actually be online in order to click through, the time I have to spend on them is much more limited. I've been weeding out all the blogs that only give me partial feeds because it annoys me so much. I miss some of my bento blogs, but not enough to deal with the partial feed crap.
Please don't take my CK away!
I prefer the full feed only because I'm on 28.8 dial-up. So it takes extra time for me to pull up my reader, and then the blog itself. It's a pain to have to click through and wait for the page to load and if I want to comment I have to wait for that page to load too. On the upside, I was pretty much mostly clicking through the partials - and I could stop the page from loading all the pictures when you have them, something that I can't do on the blog reader. I understand your reasons for doing a partial, and I like your blog well enough that I don't unsub - but I will admit that there are quite a few blogs that I don't subscribe to if their feeds are partials and their sites are too busy and take forever for me to load if I have to click over for them for me to read the full blog post.
Hi, I enjoy your blog and, like many readers, really appreciate full feeds. It's so time consuming to have to keep clicking to get the content. I guess my computer is slow.
However, I understand your side of it and wouldn't drop the blog just because I had to click through. But I would probably not read as many posts.
The only partial feeds I don't like are ones where it's only a line or two. You can't really grab my interest that way, especially when it's about food.
But if it's a good paragraph or so, or if it's only one or two lines from someone I already am friends with for a long time, then no biggie.
I'm with @melissa. The partial feed is fine with me as a quick overview, and I'll either click through or not.
I guess I'm a bit of an idiot on the subject of feeds. I click 'subscribe' on my browser's menu and just have an icon. Any blog that I subscribe to just allows me to have a menu icon for that blog--which I have to click to see if there are any new posts. So... for me, it really doesn't matter one way or the other.
That said, I've read people complaining elsewhere about the aggravation of partial feeds so I offer full feeds to my readers. Even though I don't fully comprehend what it is they're looking at one way or another.
Does this admission cause me to lose some street cred?
Thanks everybody for your votes and your comments. It looks like the Full Feeds Party wins this one by a mile, so full feeds it is!
Thanks as always for reading.
DK
I used to read CK, but deleted it off my feed reader because it didn't offer full feeds and there were plenty of other sites that do. Then today Google reader suggested I would like your blog, and now that I see it is in full feed, I will re-subscribe. I usually click through on really interesting stories anyway.
I like full feeds. I prefer to read all the things in one reader, and I typically will end up clicking to the blog for other links.
You can also (I think) put adsense in the bottom of the feed. i have seen a few other blogs do this on their feeds, so there are some options for monetizing.
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