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Almost 1000 RSS Readers

written by John Chow on October 3, 2006

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I could not believe my eyes when Feedburner updated my feed stats. Nearly 1000 people signed up to my blog feed! That is awesome! I guess you must really like me. :)

I don’t have much experienced with RSS until recently. I have started playing around with different RSS readers but nothing appealed to me until I discovered Google Reader. This is the best RSS readers I have ever used. I have been using Google Reader for about a week and I now understand why RSS is so popular – it is like having the web come to you instead of you going to the web.

One thing I have noticed is that most sites do not give full RSS feeds – they would feed the title of the article and a short summary. This is understandable since their site revenues are ad based and RSS does not feed ad banners. Some feeds do have RSS ads but I doubt they pay as well as banners on a website. One surprise was Tech Crunch – they have a full feed. I can read their entire blog from Google Reader and never have to visit their site. I am sure this is costing them some serious money – they have over 118,000 RSS subscribers. Then again, maybe the reason they have so many subscribers is because they offer a full feed. I wonder if I would get more subscribers if I were to do that same.

What are you thoughts of this? So far, one reader asked me to make my RSS a full feed. He even sent a petition site against intentionally disabled RSS feeds. I haven’t decided what to do yet. In addition, I am not sure if I can make my RSS a full feed because of the Google 300×250 ad. This ad in embedded right into the blog post and would show up on a RSS feed (at least I think it would). The Google TOS prevents regular Google ads in a feed (unless it’s a Google RSS ads). Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.

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John Chow

I do not think Wordpress has an option to let users decide what type of feed to get. Would be like if they did however. Maybe in a future update they will add it.

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Patrick

I personally do not like full feeds. I prefer an abstract to make scanning for interesting articles easier. If I want to read a complete post I can go to the site.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to offer both types of feeds on a site so users can choose their preferred method.

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Abhishek Goyal

i recently dumped bloglines after using it for close to a year. i am quite sold to google reader now. Only feature i miss is the public view of my rss feeds e.g. http://www.bloglines.com/public/AbhishekGoyal

I need it frequently to send snapshots of feeds i read to my friends

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Kim

Another RSS subscriber checking in. I just found your site a few weeks ago and I love it! Very interesting posts. I use the google homepage and read all my feeds through there (tabbed by category!). I really like their setup. Since I have so many feeds I prefer just getting the title through the feed and if the topic interests me I will click on it. I don't mind going to people's sites. If I enjoy their content it's the least I could do! People are getting really lazy nowadays huh?

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Kanwal

I'm still working on trying to surpass the 25 subscribers on my RSS feed.

Like they say, content is king and that's what I'm focusing on.

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Jeff

In the past I have chosen not to distribute the RSS feed in full, but I have found more people reading and preferring to get the full RSS (I have converted). I love to read your posts, but hate clicking to the site each time. GO FULL or go home. Ok...don't go home..but GO FULL!

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Buddha

Try Netvibes.com . It's more powerfull then google reader and it's no need for registration ...

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Lee

Thanks for linking the petition John!

Steve of www.StevePavlina.com provides full feeds and most months he easily qualifies for your top google whores list.

Steve doesn't use feedvertising, but if you decided to start putting advertising in you feeds, providing they were full feeds, I wouldn't think any less of you :)

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Eli

In about 5 days I got near 200 readers on my Photoshop Tutorials site. It's quite interesting to see isn't it? :D

Gj on all of those readers :)

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