I’m OVER partial feeds. If I add a feed into my feed reader only to discover it is a partial feed, I am unsubscribing right away and the blog will not appear in the monthly new feeds list. No matter how much I might have wanted to read that blog or enjoyed the content I saw there!
If a blogger is going to make me click through to their blog for every post in full, I’m out. Even if they are an amazing writer. Even if I really love what I saw on their blog.
Consider This –
Do bloggers really want to make their readers jump through hoops to read their content? I’m not a performing dog. :) Ain’t nobody got time for that shiznit! If I like the post and I have the time, I’m going to click through and comment.
If a blogger gives me a tiny snippet of their post and what is there does not seem interesting, I’m not clicking through. Sorry. :( A partial feed is simply a terrible concept when bloggers want people to read their writing. Those bloggers are frustrating your readers, and that content they worked so hard on is likely going to be left unread.
Current Reads –
For partial feeds already in the feed reader, I went through my feeds during October. I unsubscribed from all partial feed blogs and removed them from the blogroll. There are only two exceptions to this –
– I really, truly, deeply love your content and I want to keep reading your blog – but please, reconsider your partial feed!
– You comment here on a regular basis and/or I comment at yours regularly.
I also unsubscribed from blogs that had stopped posting, and blogs that use too many large photos as they take a long time to download, and can be very irritating. If you do not know how to resize your images, find out! Here is a post from Sephy that will help you.
Content Scraping –
If the reason you are using a partial feed is because you are worried about content scraping, there are things you can do that do not involve a partial feed – like these –
7 Tips and Tools to Stop Content Thieves in their Tracks
Beginner’s Guide to Preventing Blog Content Scraping in WordPress
But Wait, I’m Not Sure –
Do you know what kind of feed you are providing to your readers? If you do not, you had best subscribe to your own blog and find out. You should always subscribe to your own blog so you can make sure your content is appearing exactly how you want it to appear.
A partial feed is part of a post – eg, the first 20-50 characters and sometimes a photo as well. I do have blogs where all I get is the title of a post, sometimes the title and a photo and no text. None of those things are remotely tempting me to click through. In fact, what they are doing is making me feel annoyed and frustrated.
In Conclusion –
There are a lot of blogs out there in the world. I’d like to read all of them however there are not enough hours in the day. Presently I am reading over 600 blogs, which is a LOT of blogs, and the frustration I feel when I see a partial feed post simply is not fun or enjoyable for me.
It is mostly me, but bloggers who are using a partial feed, it is partly you too. If you are a blogger who only cares about blog stats and people clicking through to your blog, feel free to keep using partial feeds. I won’t be reading your blog, though. :/
Over To You –
What are your thoughts on partial feeds?
600 blogs? Nuh uh. I barely cope with the handful I read. Partial feeds, pics, whatever doesn’t bother me, but I’m not going to spend all my spare hours reading. I have a huge pile of books to do that with!!!
I just put in the October feeds, the number officially stands at 680 right now. However 680 blogs does not = 680 posts daily. I’m lucky if I get 200 posts to read a day. This morning there are 134. Because I am a very fast reader I get through the posts quickly. What I most love about reading so many blogs is the diversity of subjects and locations that I get to read about and see. I read a lot of books as well – I have over 12,000 on my e-reader. :)
I’m a bit the same. I choose to read a blog via RSS and if the whole lot’s not there then what’s the point. I mentioned it to one blogger and she said that she did it because of advertising to get more clicks on her blog. Well she lost me. I’ve noticed some of the more well known bloggers do the partial feeds. It’s a pet-hate of mine too.
It really is cutting off their nose to spite their face, because if the tiny bit served up is not interesting people won’t click through at all. Whereas if the post is interesting more people might want to leave a comment on it and click through. I’m not against blog advertising at all, I can appreciate people wanting to make $$. I just think there are better and smarter ways to get people to click through. :)
There is a read more option with wordpress, where the blogger can choose exactly the point at which someone can click through. I’ve used it from time to time when I have images which I want to *warn* people about seeing eg snakes or spiders perhaps, or a post is very long with a lot of images – I remember I did it with my The Rover movie review. That is partly to keep that article short on the blog home page as well, so people do not have to scroll forever to get past a post they are not interested in reading.. I’m sure Blogger has something similar.
I have mentioned it a few times to people, in general they are set on what they are doing and determined not to change.. that’s ok, there are a lot of great blogs out there! ;)
I have none clue if mines partial or not. Guess I’ll have to check.
Yours is a full feed. :) Thanks for that! :) Like I say in the post, I always recommend bloggers subscribing to their own feed because it is a great way to spot any problems with the feed, plus one can make sure it is coming through as one intends it to appear to other people.
I like partial feeds, but then I don’t read the number of blogs that you do. Nothing irritates me more than a feed that makes me scroll down 14 times to get to the next one. Which leads to I also don’t like really long posts. Most of the time, these super long posts are on feeds like Mental Floss and I really appreciate the partial feeds that let me decide whether I want to click through and read the whole article.
Usually there’s a keyboard shortcut to get to the next post. Saves a lot of time.
I am pretty sure mine isn’t partial (at least, I haven’t deliberately specified it to be so!) because I find that a bit frustrating too.
Thank you! I hate partial feeds, too. There are only a couple left in my reader, and I keep them for the same reasons you do. When I come across one of them in my cached posts If the topic interests me and if I have time I will click over to read the whole thing. Otherwise I move on to the next one.
I’m so glad it is not just me.. :) I find it quite difficult to connect with a blogger if they have a partial feed. I’ve let some blogs I enjoyed go over the past week and some of them were difficult to let go.. but I feel a lot happier in my feed reader now with less of them appearing in there. :)
I think I changed mine to full when I realized it was partial. Hope it’s stayed that way! :)
It has stayed that way Margaret, happy moments! :)
I dislike them too but I persist with them. There are only a couple but if the individual post doesn’t grab me from what appears in my reader, then I don’t bother clicking to go to the site, whereas if the whole post was there, I would at least skim through it. I am not sure why people do it, perhaps advertising as mentioned above or just page hits, as I don’t believe a blog receives a hit unless it is read out of your reader. Maybe you confirmed that for me in the past.
Absolutely – the blog does not get a hit unless people click through. So that is why a lot of bloggers – in particular those “pro-blogging” use a partial feed.
I used to always at least give the blog a try but I know myself well enough to know I’m not very likely to connect with a partial feed blogger, so why waste my time and energy? :)
Another one here who isn’t too keen on them either. I ‘think’ I only have one in my b/ roll that I tolerate and that’s because she uses the title to indicate what she will be writing about. Also the first couple of sentences will be about the subject as well.
It did annoy me when I first starting blogging but I continued to read, now like you when I’ve first subscribed to a new blog and the first feed comes through as partial I unsubscribe straight away.
As Jen mentioned above a lot of the ‘big well known’ bloggers use partial feeds as a way to increase page views as well as income – and I don’t subscribe to any of them lol
I did have one or two big well known bloggers on my blogroll whose blogs I enjoyed, but I made that difficult decision to unsubscribe and have let them go now. If I miss them, I can always visit the blog every couple of weeks or so.. :)
The worst ones are those where you just get the title, that is bizarre. And it seems like those bloggers are the ones whose titles never reflect the actual post, too! ;)
I’m not a fan of partial feeds, I have a couple on my list, but often don’t click through to read a full story, because the few words there don’t catch my interest. They used to be full feeds, but had a “makeover”, nice new look, but I don’t read there as much as I used to.
Makeovers are all very well but so many bloggers are unaware that probably 75% of blog readers use some kind of feed reader, so feeds and feed presentation are usually a lot more important than how the blog itself looks! ;)
Interesting. I DO find partial feeds annoying at times. Fortunately, very few of the blogs I’ve followed use that. One, however, that I follow consistently is a partial feed. However, he’s a great writer and includes enough of the opening to let me know I want to keep on reading. Then it’s just one more click. (But, I was initially put off by the arrangement and there is another blog I stopped following because I couldn’t be bothered.)
Partial feeds make it a lot harder to connect with the blogger, in my experience. :) Some of the Google Blogger ones are the worst and I am not even sure the people writing them *know* all people are getting is a title, sometimes just a title and a photo. :)
I didn’t even know what a partial feed was until you mentioned it (newbie over hereeee). I mainly use Bloglovin and don’t really deal with it, but when I use some of the other feed readers it drives me nuts! I’m pretty sure many bloggers don’t even realize they have a partial feed.
I’d agree with you Morgan – they likely do not know they are using one. Which raises the question – do I as a reader let them know, if I really wanted to read their blog? I’ve tried letting some bloggers know about things in the past – for example one blogger who was using at least 10 enormous 780kb photos on each post which took ages to download even though I am on ADSL here. Usually there is no response and nothing happens at all. I wouldn’t mind a “Hey, thanks for your email, but I’m keeping things the same for now”. At least then I can unsubscribe right away and move onto other blogs. :)
And then there was the infamous blogger who had asked for feedback on her new blog design, and rather than leave a “Oh I love it” comment like everyone else, I wrote her a private email with some of the issues I had found with her new design. She replied with a brush off, spelling my name Snoksred. Really? It was right there in the email I sent you, spelled right. You couldn’t copy and paste? How lazy! UNSUBSCRIBE!! ;)
I need to check my blog.. I like your idea of subscribing to your own blog. :)
Yours is a partial feed. :/ I probably need to write a post on how to change to a full feed for both Blogger and WordPress. ;)
Hmm after this I went to my blog and checked the settings. Blogger tells me, my blog is full feed. Deeply annoying. I’ll see what is going on in the next few days . xoxo
I couldn’t agree more. While I completely understand and respect the reasons why bloggers want you to click through (if you make your living from your blog, you need as many pageviews as possible for ad revenue), that’s their prerogative, and mine is to skip their post in my reader! I would gladly sacrifice a few pennies to make sure my readers have a better experience and keep coming back in the long run.
Nora – thanks for dropping by my place! :) You are exactly right – many of us care more about our readers than those few ad cents..
I hate partial feeds too. They’re so annoying!
Partial feeds are deeply annoying. :) There is one occasion on which I do not mind the read more tag being used, which is slightly different to a partial feed of course. On a food blog I read, the read more is used at the point of the post where they write the recipe – which means you click through to get it if you want it. I think this is a good idea for a few reasons – it helps the blogger know which recipes people want and it means the reader does not have to scroll through a recipe they are not interested in. :)