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Partial Post Feeds

I really hate websites that only offer a part of their post in their feed. I know why they do this. They do this so you have to visit their site in order to read the rest of the story. The more visitors they get, the more money they make. Here’s the problem though. The reason I am subscribing to your site is that I don’t find it useful enough to actually take the time to visit it. Most of the articles are a waste of my time but there are a few shining nuggets in there that made me want to subscribe. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and realize that it’s a partial post feed, I immediately unsubscribe. Why? Because I know I’ll never click on the link to continue reading the post. I don’t want to visit your site, that was the point of subscribing in the first place and making me visit it isn’t helping your cause. So for all you people out there that insist on making people visit your site just so you can generate a few extra cents of ad revenue, is it worth it? You’ll lose people like me. Who knows, I might have become a regular viewer of your website if you hadn’t driven me away by not providing the full text of a post. That’s been known to happen with me before.

4 replies
  1. shep
    shep says:

    i don’t mind the feeds with ads embedded. They are usually unobtrusive and at the bottom of the feed. I can deal with those. Now, if you’re gonna put ads in your feeds AND only serve the partial post, then that really sucks.

  2. Sean Kelly
    Sean Kelly says:

    I agree with you that I hate partial post feeds as well as ads in feeds. However I disagree about the reason. The websites I subscribe to are the ones were I want to know if they’ve added anything. And that’s not just blogs anymore. For Example, ThinkGeek has a feed for new items for sale. If I have no intention of going to a site again, I probably won’t add the feed. The reason I hate partial post feeds is because I’m lazy.

    P.S. That notify me of followup comments via e-mail checkbox below. Is that a new part of WordPress or a plug in?

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