When I talked recently about Darren Rowse's poll into the reasons that people unsubscribe from RSS feeds, I mentioned the biggest issue: the number of posts that publishers send to subscribers.
That issue took up the first two reasons that people unsubscribe. But in third place was a much tougher question, and it's one I often wonder about: whether to include the whole article or just part of the article in an email or RSS post.
When it comes to the front page of a blog, the answer is clear. You want to offer a bunch of teasers that lead to individual pages with single articles. Users can read the beginning of each post, choose the ones they want to see and hit the Read More link. When they reach the whole article, they'll be offered ads highly targeted to the subject of each post.
But when users ask to read posts on their RSS readers, they're making a statement. They're saying that they don't want to surf to a website to read an article. They want to do everything from their RSS reader.
Of course, if they get the whole article on their reader, they're not going to click any of your ads. But if you give them only a part of the article, they'll unsubscribe.
So what should you do?
The easiest solution is simply to let those users go. There's no reason for you to give your content away for free. If a user doesn't want to come to your site and view the ads, he can't have your content.
But it's likely that some of those users might come to your site some of the time, especially to add comments. They might also pass your messages on to friends.
One strategy then might be to mix your posts up. Offer some full articles that include a strong encouragement for people to share their opinion and experiences. And also throw in a few teasers to important articles to get people surfing in to read.
That might help you both to keep your subscribers and your clickthroughs.
Google has been experimenting with ads in RSS feeds for a couple of years now, but the Beta is full and there's no sign that they're going to make the program Alpha any time soon. Until that happens, we're going to have to keep battling to push subscribers off their RSS readers and onto our ads.
What are your thoughts? Post your comments below!
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