Forget partial feeds - go full!

Problogger switched today to publish full contents in RSS feeds instead of the first few lines, and this gives me the opportunity to advise you too to choose full feeds.

Technorati Tags: feed

Let's see it from the other side: What are the common arguments against full feeds?

Nobody will visit my blog if they can read the full contents in feed

I don't think so. If you have interesting posts, visitors will want to read or add comments to it, so they will go to your blog. Plus, some people are less likely to subscribe to partial feeds - so you might completely loose those. Look at it this way: how can you provide a better service to your readers? What will help more to create a growing community around your blog?

I will loose advertisement income because of full feeds

There's a chance of it, in the short terms. But if you provide full feeds, your reader base is more likely to grow faster - meaning more income. Plus, you have various options to monetize your full feeds too - FeedForAll has a comparison of some of the ad services providing the possibility to insert advertisements in feeds.

Partial feeds are enough for the readers to judge if they are interested in the post

Yes. Even well-written titles are enough - at least they should be. Concentrate on providing killer titles - you have two seconds to catch the attention of the readers. And if you catched, don't let it go by providing just a few lines of contents in your feeds.

Full posts are taking too long to scroll through in feedreaders

Maybe. If you really think this is a serious issue for your readers, you still have the possibility to provide another feed with just the first paragraph as an option. Personally, I think this is an interface problem of the feedreaders, and they should come up with a solution to provide a usable way to display long feed items while maintaining readability.

Scraper sites are stealing my contents through full feeds

If this is the case, you should protect your intellectual properties, legally. Technical protection methods are never perfect, and providing partial feeds is not even the most advanced one. Spam blogs have automated mechanisms which will soon have the function - if they don't already have - to find the permalink for your blog entry and grab the contents straight from there.

Did I miss out anything? Do you have other arguments for or against full feeds? Let us know.

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