E-Media Tidbits

nytimes.com Freakanomics recently moved to NYtimes.com -- to the dismay of many of its feed subscribers.

Why? Because as part of the switch the blog's RSS feed experienced some significant problems. First of all, as Dubner noted on Aug. 17, "Roughly 90 percent of the people who read this blog via RSS feed had their subscriptions interrupted when we moved our blog to NYTimes.com." In other words, the site inadvertently cut off most of its most loyal community members -- not a smart move in any media. Fortunately, this problem was quickly fixed.

However, a thornier problem remains. While the original Freakonomics feed offered the full text of postings (useful for offline and mobile reading, as well as within feed readers, which increasing numbers of net users prefer to visiting sites), the Times' version of the Freakonomics feed offers only headlines and very short excerpts from the beginnings of posts.

As soon as the switch to a "partial feed" happened, a firestorm of negative comments erupted on the blog. For instance, "Corey" commented:

"I love the NYT, but I hate their feed service. There’s nothing worse that the abbreviated RSS feed text. Not only is it annoying to have to open another window when browsing, but it's also difficult to read the blog offline. (I tend to catch up on blog reading during flights using Google Reader Offline). One thing Freakonomics had going for it was complete posts in the feed. And the thing is, with [the Firefox add-on] Adblock, [Firefox users don't see] the ads on NYTimes.com anyway, it's just another tab we have to open. I know there's nothing either of the authors can do about this, I just wanted to vent."

Partial feeds are popular with media organizations and others who measure success primarily by counting pageviews on their sites. That is, they think it's more important to lure people to their site so they can count them and increase their online ad rates, than it is to build loyalty by finding better ways to serve online communities on their own terms.

Seems to me that, as media organizations learn to adapt their operations and business models to online media, they'd do well to learn how to make money from feeds (yes, you can put ads in feeds) as well as educating advertisers to make ad content more inherently valuable and engaging. Also, properly distributed full-text feeds make your content much more findable via all kinds of search engines and aggregators, potentially leading to increased page views well after initial publication.

As long as we keep trying to lure people to sites where they're forced (or at least, more likely) to view ads that they'd rather avoid altogether, we're fighting a losing battle. As the blog Techdirt put it recently, "Taking value away from users to try to force a specific action is almost always going to be less desirable than providing people what they want."

Techdirt also argues that full-text feeds ultimately yield more pageviews by increasing overall audience size. I'm not sure I agree with that; I think that depends very much on the communities you're trying to reach -- although I do think there are search visibility benefits that can lead to increased traffic for content over time.

However, one thing's for certain: If your news organization currently publishes only partial feeds, you can switch it to full-text for a few days or weeks as an experiment, to monitor the results. It's always better to make decisions based on information and experience.

How does the full-v-partial feed issue play out at your news organization? Which have you chosen, and why? Please comment below.