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.

Subscribe to my Niche Blog about Google AdSense!

If you are a first-time visitor, and considering the age of my blog you most probably are, you should subscribe to this blog.

It is quite easy to do by clicking the "Subscribe To" widget on the left hand column of this page. Doing this you make sure that you will not miss any update or any interesting bits of information.

Of course, you can use the traditional bookmarking, but do you really remember to visit all the bookmarked sites you have hiding somewhere in the menu of your web browser? If you are like me, you most probably forget the links and never visit the site again.

There are many good free applications for reading RSS and Atom feeds. Wikipedia has a nice list of different feed aggregators - you might very well have some aggregator already installed in your system.

If you don't want to (or cannot) install any new applications you can of course use web based aggregators. Google reader is a good example of them.

Do yourself a service and subscribe to this blog now. It is a win-win situation: you win by reading this blog regularly and I win new readers.

During the last year I have experimented a bit both with full feeds and partial feeds, feeds with AdSense and without AdSense, feeds using Sideburner and a lot more. I'll return to this theme later. If you subscribed to this blog, you cannot miss the later posts on this interesting topic!