Farewell to Full-Text Feeds?

I’ve noticed over time that the number of people who ‘consume’ RSS4Lib on RSS4Lib.com has declined steadily over the years. Yet the number of feed subscribers is still steadily increasing (see today’s subscriber report and has recently broken 2000).
At the same time, few articles I post are read on RSS4Lib.com more than 100 times the day they are published, and most are viewed only a few times a day after that. (Selected items in the backfile, thanks to Google and Bing, get more traffic than recently published items once the new posts have aged a few days.)
I suspect this trend holds true across many blogs, whether they’re produced for love or money. (This one, to be clear, is not produced as a moneymaking venture.)
Some are suggesting that the days of full-text feeds are numbered (see “Say Bye Bye to Full RSS Feeds and RSS: What’s the Deal in 2010?,” as examples). I’m curious to know if these commercial prognosticators are correct — will bloggers tend to pull people toward the richness of their sites, even if there is no particularly strong monetary incentive to do so? Or will full-text feeds continue to be the way to go? I suspect a trend toward full text feeds (for blogs that are works of avocation) and snippet feeds (for those that are more vocational). And I’ll wager that this will break down (to oversimplify greatly) into an academic/commercial divide.

Related posts:

  1. Full Text Health Articles FeedNavigator
  2. Farewell, Bloglines, It’s Been Swell
  3. Fair Use and Quoting Commercial Content
  4. Gale and RSS Feeds

3 thoughts on “Farewell to Full-Text Feeds?”

  1. I tend to agree with your last two sentences (but would change “academic” to “noncommercial”–there are a lot of us out here who are neither businesses nor academics). Those whose primary interest is in reaching their audience for the sake of what they have to say will provide full-text feeds. Those who are more concerned about eyeballs-at-the-blog-itself (for whatever reasons) won’t.

  2. I actually prefer snippet feeds, as I have multiple iGoogle pages set up for monitoring different subjects of interest. Full-text feeds do not fair well in that environment. I’d rather have a summary snippet or abstract I can skim, and click through to the full article if I’m interested.

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