I don’t like excerpts, because they inhibit offline reading.

I do like feeds because they allow me to focus on content and content alone. As you said people put a lot of time and effort in making their site look good but I sometimes feel distracted by all those bells and whistles. By providing a feed I have a choice, which IMVHO is a very good thing.

And last but not least with a feed the news is brought to me, I do not have to go looking for it. I do not have to check tons of pages, I simply start my feed reader and have access to all sites at once.

RSS creates less friction for the reader to get a number of news sources to read with a minimum of fuss. If they like what you’ve written, they’re likely to post it to their own weblog or to del.icio.us – which in turn drive traffic to your actual site.

Most of the sites I see are the ones someone in a weblog has pointed to. So you see the site “chrome” – with ads for some.

Net-net I think the increased readership has a huge upside – more readers, more people exposed to your ideas, more link-flow through weblogs, social bookmarking sites and increased google-juice.

They help in that by people subscribing you have an easy method of getting people to keep track of what your writing and you can generate return traffic that way.

They hurt in that if you publish a full feed then there is often not the need for people to actually visit. There is the alternative of publishing an extract feed but from personal experience i find they annoy rather than generate proportionally more traffic.

Thanks for the thoughtful post and it is a topic that I have struggled with myself. I have some thoughts on the matter but it became a little long in the tooth and not practical to put here.

So I have posted it on my blog, and I hope you will drop by and have a gander and let me know what you think.

BTW, I would have trackbacked but I can’t seem to find the link (now where did I put those glasses).

Cheers!

I second the excerpt idea, as people will be able to make the conscious decision wether they want to read the whole post. I’m always amazed, stunned really, when there’s a site with over a thousand readers, and there are generally 3 or 4 comments per thread. I’ve never been able to figure that out. I was running a blog with 300 uniques a day and I’d get frustrated if that was the grand total for a post.

And, something else, I saw how there was a study that said that out of a hundred readers, 10 were going interact, and only maybe one would do so on a regular basis. So, adding all that together, if your aim is to have 30-comment long blog posts, then you have to optimize for that. Same thing for if you want the mad blog hits, or if you want mad blog money.

It sounds like a good idea, but how would that effect those subscribing. They may not see a point in subscribing for partial feeds…

I predict that RSS will evolve to where publishers can just send their adsense or other program id in the description headers and the more popular readers will split up the ads on a 60/40 basis or something. Or at least that’s what I’d like to see.