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Partial vs. Full Content Feeds

People are talking about full content vs. partial content feeds again. To me this seems like a complete non-issue - and a simple one at that.

Feeds are new technology, the old guard is scared and slow to adopt.

Remember in the early days of the web when newspapers wouldn’t put their content online? Same thing here… eventually enough quality content will be in full content feeds and the partial feed folks will have to play along or they will become irrelevant.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted November 30th, 2005 @ 4:13 PM

12 Replies

Chris adds this Comment:

Hi Alex,

I really enjoy your posts - but fyi the reason I do partial feeds isn’t for money-grubbing or anything. It’s for organizational ease for the reader; I would love to only receive the first 100 characters of every post, with each entry evenly spaced, instead of being bombarded with someone’s 28-paragraph pontification when I just wanted to skim the main idea. Check out the post here and then thoroughly disagree with me:

Luckily, I’m the only one reading my blog, so I’m already irrelevant and don’t need to play along…

November 30th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
Alex adds this Comment:

The point is to give the reader a choice. By offering only a partial content feed, the user has no choice to get the full content if they want it.

Offering a summary feed as well as full content feeds is nice, and many feed reading programs give the option to show the first N characters - you get the idea.

I’m referring more to CNN, Washington Post, ESPN, etc.

November 30th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:

I agree with Alex: I want the choice. Do what you have to do on your end to monetize the content for the full feed if you need to do that—I understand! I will take the convenience of a full feed if it comes with an ad penalty.

There are times when I want a summary feed, but not many; for a personal site, I want the full feed every damn time.

December 1st, 2005 at 10:37 am
Agylen adds this Trackback:

Partial content feeds headed for irrelevancy

Alex King: “Remember in the early days of the web when newspapers wouldn’t put their content online? Same thing here… eventually enough quality content will be in full content feeds and the partial feed folks will have to play along …

December 5th, 2005 at 4:47 pm
Dicontas adds this Comment:

Can I raise another side issue of duplicate content - in that, if you present your whole post as a RSS feed, then other *immoral* websites (that copy this content from your feeds onto their own websites) could result in Google penalising you for non unique content - even though your site has published the original content.

December 18th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Claudius adds this Comment:

I still can’t decide if I shoud go partial or full feed…

Basically I don’t want anyone to take my content and also becauase I’d like people to go to my site if they wanna read it, but then I also understand that if someone - like me - uses a feed reader, it’s a lot less hassle to go to all the sites/pages.

March 4th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Devlounge | For the Love of the Web, Please Use Full Content Feeds! adds this Pingback:

[…] between full content vs. partial content is a non-issue because eventually partial feed sites will risk being made irrelevant by the quality full feed sites. However, something that is a “non-issue” sure irks the […]

April 18th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Duncan adds this Comment:

Your so right, giving people the choice is the most important thing, if its about adverts then they can be perfectly well embedded in the feed. Feedburner is fairly good at stat gathering as well.

I got so annoyed with the BBC news website I bodged up a script one evening to convert some of their partial feeds to full. Bit over the top but hopefully soon they’ll do it themselves.

May 16th, 2007 at 4:22 am
Enough With The Partial RSS Feeds! » Blog-Op adds this Pingback:

[…] are many bloggers that feel this way about partial feeds, and if you read into the comments, you’ll see that the vast proportion of the commenters […]

May 29th, 2007 at 6:10 am
Stephen Cronin adds this Comment:

Alex, I know you say that many feed readers offer the choice to get a summary feed, but most of the ones I use don’t!

Anyway, in an effort to stop people arguing about this, I’ll blatantly plug my DualFeeds plugin for WordPress, which lets you offer BOTH a full post feed AND a summary feed. Let your subscribers choose what’s best for them…

November 19th, 2007 at 3:22 am
For the Love of the Web, Please Use Full Content Feeds! | Devlounge adds this Pingback:

[…] between full content vs. partial content is a non-issue because eventually partial feed sites will risk being made irrelevant by the quality full feed sites. However, something that is a “non-issue” sure irks the […]

June 10th, 2008 at 2:24 am
staying.cool » partial -> full adds this Pingback:

[…] read more than a few posts, such as this, and this, this, this, this, this, this [i assume you get the idea now]; all of which play devils advocate on the topic of partial […]

November 10th, 2008 at 4:34 pm

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