Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I hope your advertisers weren't counting on your readers actually visiting your blog and seeing their ads.

Seems like a bad idea for any blog that sells ad space.

Another instance of the vocal minority getting their way.

Thank you so much, John! I'm not the one who asked, but I'm very appreciative that you changed it.

Mike,

Thanks for your thoughts.

My ads are sold on a per impression or per click basis so they are what they are whether a reader visits or not. I'm way more concerned about what my readers want. In fact, I would do away with advertising completely if enough readers complained.

thanks you...finally!!

I can appreciate you willingness to do what your readers want.

One sure thing about readers is that they are concerned about themselves, not you, not your blog.

I hope it works better for you, but I doubt it will add to the growth of your blog.

Being concerned about your readers sounds noble, but it's really not.

Without the readers seeing all the other bits of info and other chances to sample your content, share it with others, etc., full feeds are really just a slow death for a blog.

Good luck in getting it to grow without the full page being in front of the reader.

Why have a homepage if your readers never see it ?

Why put up the banners, why sell ads, why the buttons, why the links ?

Good luck with feed " readers ".

Mike.

That simply is not true that full text is a slow death for a blog. I will not read a blog that is not full text and the only reason I still subscribed to this one is because John is local, and when I emailed him about going full text, he said he would look at it. But I would almost never click through the rss to the actual site. In fact, I would usually ignore his posts all together just because it was a pain in the ass. Look at the top blogs in feedster and technorati...how many of them are full text? how many of them are dead. The only death to a blog is a lack of effort by the owner.

Tim

Yay!! Full text!!

The whole point of RSS is not only to be notified of new content but to gain access to the full content through my preferred method - for instance, an RSS aggregator. Syndicating only the summary is really, really annoying, forcing the visitor to go back to the browser and read the blog that way. If you're subscribed to more than 10 blogs, this extra click can really kill all the joy. I know several people that completely ignore a blog if it doesn't provide full text syndication, regardless of how great it might be. No flexible access to content? Not worth reading.

It is true that getting the content through RSS means those people will not access your site with their browsers; consequently, they will not get you any revenue from ads that are no longer displayed. But, at one point you have to decide which is more valuable: a few more bucks a day, or a whole crowd of happy readers which ocasionally give you some great feedback. Today's faithful reader could be tomorrow's business partner.

Tim and Titel,

After having typed out a response and hitting submit, I find out that this blog only allows 1500 characters in the comments and I had typed 1932.

Once again, John, your blog does something to hinder it's readers.

Shame for that info not being shown BEFORE I wasted my time.

I've posted my reply on my blog, rather thna fight this system and it's faults.

http://simplenomics.com/full-feeds-or-excerpts-...

You're welcome to click thru and read.

Please come visit us during the Carnival of Marketing, too.

Hi, John, thanks for getting to the bottom of the full feeds saga, I appreciate it.
As for the naysayers, well I think they're wrong, The comments are still on your site, and I'm here again to comment having come to the comments to see what everyone else was saying. It's the conversation that's important to a Blog or a Web Site, the other things are secondary.

I won't read a blog that isn't full text unless someone with full-text feeds links over to it. Enough said. Thanks for doing this!

Good decision, let users decide how they consume. I have read numerous arguments pro and con, for both sides there are reasons, it differs per blog.

For blogs like this one (I suspect), the business model is in the guru-status of the writer, not in adsense clicks. Guru-status is achieved with exposure, and full rss feeds yield more exposure. This is because there are no people that "hate" full feeds, only people that "hate" non-full feeds, so now John gets both.
And apparently there are people that hate people who change their rss feed from summary to full...


On the side, John, your feed needs some formatting. It's quite unreadable (for me) now, the posts are just rammed in there without any paragraphing :)

Wow ! The former bigtime blogmeister Scoble says full text or nothing...I think I'll change my position that's based on logic, fact, common sense and smart business practices, just because he says to.

Naaaahhhh !