The Jeff Beckham Weblog

I subscribe to nearly 100 RSS feeds. Nine of those come from Statesman.com blogs. So I notice quickly when there are changes to the way I receive those feeds in my feed reader, Bloglines. This week, those feeds changed from delivering the headline and an excerpt from the blog posting to showing the headline only. I have to click on the headline to read any of the post. This, sadly, is a big step back for the Statesman, which has been doing some good things online.

I assume the change is meant to encourage people who receive these updates in a feed reader to click on the link and visit either Statesman.com or Austin360.com. It will likely have just the opposite effect.

The Statesman’s blogs, even as they near 20 in number, still make up only a small fraction of the total traffic to their site. And a fraction of that number would come from feed readers like Bloglines or Newsgator. So the potential increase in traffic or click-throughs seems very small.

I guess it’s possible that more people click on headlines only than full-text feeds. I mean, what other option do you have in that case? But it’s also true that many people will not subscribe to headline-only feeds, so the exposure of that particular blog is greatly decreased.

When sites like Feedster or Google Blog Search crawl and index feeds, they collect only what’s out there. Why leave yourself with only a hastily-written headline when you can give yourself the full opportunity to be found and placed in search engines that will drive traffic and revenue to your site?

As Microsoft’s Robert Scoble points out:

Treating RSS readers well will get you more Web browser readers. And … full-text sites will be more profitable because of this than partial-text sites.

In pure journalistic terms, using the headline only puts a lot of pressure on the person who writes the headline - it has to be compelling enough for me to click on it. Finally, the feeds aren’t for the publisher’s benefit for click-throughs. They’re for the reader’s benefit.

If you’re not willing to go the whole way with full-text feeds, then why not include a one- or two-sentence summary of the post? That’s the way the New York Times does it. Or consider adding text or banner ads to your RSS feed.

If the change is indeed to headline-only feeds, I’m going to unsubscribe to all of them. It’s not worth the trouble.