Jeff Beckham

A couple of weeks ago, the Statesman changed the nature of their RSS feeds from providing a headline and some initial wording to being headline-only. I argued at the time that feeds that show the full text of an item were the way to go.

One of the main drivers of the Statesman’s decision was the theory that people would be more likely to click on the items that were headline-only to get the rest of the story. However, a new study by RSS ad vendor Pheedo shows that that may not be the case; that in fact, the average click-through rates (CTR) are nearly identical for full and summary feeds.

An excerpt from the full report (pdf file):

While the 12% average CTR of summary feeds (full content not shown in the feed item) vs. the 10% of full text feeds seems to initially support delivering content via summary feeds, thus achieving the goal of greater click-through back to the website, this figure is largely influenced by significant outliers in CTR in summary feeds.
A better measure is the median CTR (which provides a better measure of the CTR tendency when there are large outliers) of the summary and full text feeds. The median CTR of summary feeds is 8% CTR and the full text feed median CTR is at 10%.

It’s still early, both since the Statesman’s change and in the world of RSS feeds, so there’s still more information to gather. Also, as the area of RSS advertising continues to develop, I’m sure there will be more data.