I’ve seen much comment and discussion about the practice of summarizing RSS feeds.
The idea behind doing this, is to encourage those that take your feed to come to your blog. They get interested enough in reading the first two or three hundred words of your latest article, that they click on the ‘more’ link.
This gets more folks to actually visit your blog, as you’re using the feed as a ‘teaser’ and this means more folks will click thru on your ads if you’re monetizing your blog. That’s the theory anyway.
The other side of the coin is that many people won’t bother clicking to read the full article on your site, and in fact many of those that take your feed will simply discontinue doing so.
Now, I am aware that feed subscribers go up and down. Hopefully your feed count goes up in bigger steps than it goes down, so it’s always gradually increasing, even if on a saw-tooth kind of flow.
Last evening, I finally got around to moving all my RSS feeds over to Google proper, from Feedburner. Google takes care of the re-direction.
Now this morning, I was checking around, and I noticed that one of one sites feed counts had dropped by some 30% overnight. There’s a lot of factors here.
- It just happened that way – well perhaps, but 30% in on go?
- Google screwed up the re-direct? I don’t think so, or almost 100% of the subscribers would have gone.
- The ’summary burner’ tab somehow got switched on in the move. This was what I found upon investigation, and in fact, only the first 400 words were being delivered, with a ‘read more’ link after that.
We’ll see of course. I’ve now de-activated the summary burner option, so the full feed will again display, and we’ll see if the count goes back up.
