My next trip is april but right now Nick is away on performancing business, he has been in New York and will now be in SF. I am holding the fort back here in merrieoldengland.

And if they don’t want to click the “more” link they won’t do it. I sure as hell don’t, and any publisher who wants my clicks has approximately 4 options:

1. Reference previous posts of yours within your posts (Engadget is famously good at this)…
2. Make me pay for your wonderful content (I likely won’t do it, but you can try it anyway)…
3. Put ads in your RSS feed (I have never once clicked an ad in an RSS feed, but you don’t need everyone to click for your campaign to be a success)
4. Stop whining, ranting, and disparaging your readers/customers, or they will make you pay, Chester.

I use a feed reader precisely because it is a feed reader. I do not want to click out of the reader, so I sort of resent having partial text in the newsfeed. I tend to unsubscribe from incomplete feeds. And I don’t care if I’m using your RSS bandwidth (or feedburner’s or anybody else’s). I’m the customer. I’m the reader. You make me happy or I walk away. You either want me to read you or you don’t. The important thing is that you have something of value for me, and that whatever you make me pay (ads or clicks or views or listens or whatever), it is commensurate with what I take away from your content.

Having said that, I feel as if I’ve spent way too much time responding to this post. Good grief. Where are my priorities?

WordPress, for instance, only allows a global full feed switch. Why don’t we have an option to publish both the full and abbreviated feed, so the consumer can choose which to subscribe to?

Finally, WordPress and FeedBlitz’s partial feeds truncate at a hard limit of so many words or characters – if I were publishing a partial feed, I’d want to specify a cut at the –more–.

If Feedburner’s being used, then the publisher doesn’t suffer. But the subscriber does incur a bandwidth cost, and it’s especially expensive from a mobile device.

Speaking of which, Nick, if you’re reading this, you’re on the road right now, right? I think Chris is as well. Are you guys still reading the RSS feeds you’re subscribed to, on your mobile devices? Full- or partial-text? Both? Are you concerned about the costs?

Andy’s right in that many of us frequenting Performancing probably don’t have to worry yet about our publishing bandwidth. But we all probably want to get there Now wouldn’t it be a bad precedent to set up full-text feeds then withdraw them later? It is more than possible, especially in the blogosphere, for a site to become popular without proportional earnings. It happens. (I’m always about worst-case scenario, being a programmer and all. Maybe it’s a negative way to look at life.)

Consider this fake example, from a subscriber’s point of view. You subscribe to 100 feeds of 20 full-text items daily of 3K per item. That’s only 6Mb/d, or about 180 Mb/m (one update/day). Not so bad. But the maximum plans I’ve seen (at least in Canada) for a mobile device only allow 250 Mb/m. If you are a journalist (or whatever) and are on the road lot, you’d benefit most by subscribing to RSS feeds.

Now if you wanted to increase your subscription count, you couldn’t on some plans because of the bandwidth cap. On other plans, it would presently cost $0.25/Mb. I’m saying that the partial-text experience isn’t so awkward as some people are making it out to be

I suppose what it all comes down to is that some publishers may want to consider offering two sizes of feed. But at some point, the full-text feeds will cost money somehow. Surely Feedburner cannot forever afford to foot their bandwidth bill?

1. You have to sell copies to get readers.
2. You have to sell ads to make copies affordable to readers.

Statement number one is the conceptual problem with pro blogging.

Any comments about how to solve that (again)?

I’m a big fan of full-text feeds. I know how to use a feed reader properly and I’ll happily click through to a full story if I have to. But I’d much rather read the story in my nice comfortable Bloglines environment, and if it’s really big or really important, I’ll usually click through anyway. If it’s really good, I’ll click through, bookmark it, post it to del.icio.us, and blog about it.

I do think unlimited-access full-text feeds are doomed, but that’s because of plagiarism by thousands of spam sites, not the cost of bandwidth…

Unfortunately, online advertising has a ways to go before it reaches a maturity level and form that’s acceptable to the majority.

It’s easy for bloggers to think online advertising is in its infancy, but I’ve been making money through sites with advertising since 1996. The market has actually reached a maturity level: Look at cnn.com, myspace.com, and other popular sites. (Google.com comes to mind.) They all have advertising, and the majority finds it quite acceptable.

It’s just a small cross-section of geeks and bloggers who find all advertising unacceptable. Most people are just fine with advertising until it goes overboard.