Techdirt: Why Full Text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views (The Freakonomics Explanation)
Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.
I hate partial text feeds. It’s very true that I am much less likely to read an article if I have to click through. And with so much content on the internet, much of it pretty decent, there’s a good chance that I can find something else just as good as what you wrote.
I ‘m looking through my RSS reader, and there are hardly any feeds that I read regularly that don’t do full text. Uniwatch doesn’t, and I frequently forget to read it. The Hardball Times doesn’t, and I only read articles there where the subject line is intriguing. Almost every site I read every day, including the above-linked Techdirt, has a full feed.
And look – here I am, blogging about something that they wrote at Techdirt, proving their point.