Full feeds or partial feeds, that's the question!

Many bloggers cannot decide whether they should publish full RSS or Atom feeds of the blog or not. During the last year, I have experimented with both partial and full feeds but I have not reached any final conclusions.

The arguments for both cases seem pretty valid. But let us analyse the case and the common arguments first.

Partial feeds are necessary

Many bloggers find that it is best to publish only partial feeds. It is difficult to monetize the feed as there are problems in adding AdSense ads to the feeds.

From this point of view, publishing full feeds causes less readers to return to the actual web site. Most of the readers use only feed readers and consequently they never click the ads. Because of this, it is not possible to get the highest possible AdSense revenues.

Content piracy

Some bloggers are afraid of content piracy. There is simply no way to stop people reusing the content you've created.

But on the other hand, it is almost as easy to recycle content even in case of partial feeds. Someone has even translated at least one article from my Linux blog to Chinese. Well, I'm quite happy with that as the guy linked the translation to my blog. In this way, I got some new readers from China.

Case for full feeds

It seems that publishing full feeds at least slightly reduced the number of AdSense clics in my other blogs. But on the other hand, only after I started to publish the feeds in full, the number of subscriptions really started to grow.

So if you have an idea about how to monetize the feeds in a way that is not dependent on AdSense, you might well see the publication of full feeds as the optimal strategy.

At the moment I try to make at least some bucks with Amazon Associate program by recommending books that can be bought from Amazon. So far, the sales have not been spectacular, but at least the affiliate program provides me a way to make some money with the feeds.