Posted 12 September 2007, by Aaron
As I’m sure the infamous Swiss Toni would agree, writing a blog is like making love to a beautiful woman. First you must seduce her with a sexy headline. Once you have her attention you should start at the top, whispering irresistible promises into her ear as you slowly work your way down the body. Then… you give her your full-length feed.
So imagine how she would feel if, just as you were starting to get going, she saw your feed was… truncated?
The debate surrounding whether to publish full-length RSS feeds or shortened ‘excerpt’ feeds is a long-rumbling debate. The argument for truncated feeds is that a reader who reads your blog through their RSS reader is a reader that doesn’t see your advertising, therefore losing you potential ‘monetization’ joy!
Being a busy chap with far too many feeds to read, I had a purge this weekend. Quite a few blogs got the chop, and all of them were blogs publishing truncated excerpt feeds. Monetize that!
So my fellow blog publishers, please listen to me. If you want to expose me to your revenue-generating advertising, entice me with compelling articles with engaging and enjoyable conversations that I want to participate in. Don’t tease me with your flirty excerpts, they’re off-putting.
I’m an easy guy to satisfy: just give me your full length!
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Tags:Blogging, RSS, Swiss Tony
Haha, nice one Aaron.
Hopefully you’ll have saved yourself a good deal of time by clearing out the feed subscriptions. I know how quickly those unread posts can build up.
LOL! That, by far, is the most interested post on truncated feeds. 
Having recently considered adding banner ads to my site, I heavily considered truncating my feed. I opted not to do it because I believe that the people that visit me regularly enough to subscribe, should be allowed to do so ad free. Most people who visit a site regularly have banner blindness on that site anyway.
LOL I think people would get bored if I hadn’t truncated the feed and they won’t visit the site because they can just read the posts from their feed readers.
Ah. But wait will you get spam blogs using your full feeds to run their adsense littered site.
I have myself grasp on this issue many times. And decided to use optional excerpts instead that list a summary of your article. Its better than the “more” tag as you can control what your reader reads. I also use excerpts displayed on my site.
Yes while it is more convenient to have full feeds, what I do is often, browse many rss sites and pick content to read by opening another tab or window. This weeds out the ones i want to read and comment. Thus an excerpt makes sense.
Interestingly i have experienced an increase of rss readers not decrease.
Hi David - Unfortunately I’ve still got a few hundred unread posts in my reader. I need to build blog-reading back into my day.
Shantanu - haha, I’m glad you found my post interesting 
Justin - You know I don’t think I have clicked an advert on any website for a few years - I really mean that too. I’ve just conditioned myself to ignore them.
Firewalker - Thanks for visiting my site and commenting. Personally I don’t mind if people read my site through their reader, but then I don’t run any advertising. I just think that the one sure way of getting people to click their feed reader and visit your site is if your content is compelling enough to make them want to comment.
DT - Good point. My Swiss Toni analogy didn’t really consider content sploggers - in fact it doesn’t bare thinking about what Swiss Toni would have to say about them.
Well, I didn’t delete your feed because I know your content is always quality, and to be honest I didn’t actually notice your were doing excerpts. I think you do it a sensible way as the standard excerpt function is poor: firstly it just throws the first 50 words or so at the feed reader - not always enough to grab a readers attention; secondly it doesn’t format the excerpt so you just get an ugly block of text in the feed reader - not enough to grab my attention. The way you do it avoids these problems.
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for that. I think the optional excerpts is great as you still can format it. I always hated that truncated issue.
Also it would seem that optional excerpts displays managed excerpts but will display the full RSS in your reader. Great for killing spam blogs.
Please keep intouch.
Nicely said. I noticed recently that a couple of my daily reads had started truncating their feeds - and I did the same as you and removed them from my reader.
As far as I’m concerned, if I wanted to read the whole post on their site then I wouldn’t have joined their feed in the first place…
Incidentally, thanks for having the most disctracting image in an article ever!
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David Airey
13 September 2007, 1:39 pm