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Full-text Feeds vs. Summary-text Feeds and the Winner is…

Feb 27, 2006
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I have been watching the discussion between Scoble and Duncan at the Blogging Herald about whether full-text vs. summary-text feeds and whether or not ads in feeds suck. They both make good arguments.

Knowing a little something about RSS analytics and advertising I thought I would weigh in on the conversation. My position isn’t to say who is right or wrong but rather to report the numbers.

I took a quick peek at our database and compared the click-through-rates on full-text feeds vs. summary-text feeds. The findings may surprise you, full feeds receive twice the number of clicks to the site. The clicks were measured on the headlines of the feed items.

Full-text feeds CTR – 17%
Summary-text feeds CTR – 7%

From my unscientific study, if you want to drive more traffic to your site, publish full feeds and don’t worry if you are putting ads in your feed. The CTR on the ads in both types of feeds was nearly the same. Much more to follow on this subject. I’ll do a more in depth study. So stay tuned.

In a soon-to-be published post, we’ll determine whether or not RSS advertising “sucks.” But a couple of quick notes:

1. No one, TODAY, is going to get rich off of putting ads in feeds.
2. Ads in feeds do perform (based on CTR and repeat buyer data).
3. Publishers understand how to make money on their site so they fear publishing full content feeds.

This is the first full-text feed I published with Revenews. Now, don’t let me down. Click on the headline!

Filed under: RSS Feeds/Syndication
  • http://www.affiliatetip.com Shawn Collins

    Hey Bill –

    Interesting that it gets more clicks, but I'd be curious to see if there is any correlation to distributing full text feeds and less AdSense income (for those where it applies) for pages where the original posts reside.

    There are already tons of sites that publish summary text feeds just monetize the keyword rich content of others.

    Give them the full versions, and all of those delicious AdSense clicks may transfer from the author of the content to the people that re-publish it for the purpose of getting AdSense clicks.