Well, despite several supporting voices, it’s clear a large percentage of you, at least those who commented, would be quite unhappy if I turned my feed into excerpts. I hear you.
There were several good points and questions. First, yes, my feed does have ads, from Feedburner, an FM and Searchblog partner. But Feedburner does not approach marketing the way FM does, and while we are great partners, the marketers that FM works with are less interested in feeds and more in site-specific advertising. That’s not to say Feedburner’s approach is less valuable, not at all. It’s just that on the site, brand marketers can do far more, and to be honest, many are more comfortable in that environment in terms of execution and such. FB sells categories and scale, FM sells specific sites, conversational marketing, and integrated programs. Both work, and most marketers do both.
Many of you noted that you’ll click through from a full text feed and that drives a lot of site traffic. That’s entirely true. The experiment was an attempt to see if excerpts would drive significantly more, while not alienating my readership. From the results of my very unscientific poll, I’d clearly be alienating at least a very vocal minority.
I’m not eager to do that. It’s why I asked in the first place, after all. I may try this as an experiment in any case (or an A/B test, if I can find the time to set it up!), and those of you who swore you’d delete my feed – gimme a chance to learn something!
If I don’t do that, I have another idea I might try….