Colorado Business Immigration

They currently have autoposters for WordPress and Joomla. They will be releasing posters for phpBB, MyBB, and SMF by the end of the week as well.

I’ve grappled with the issue myself over the years. I’ve yet to see one solid case study that shows going to full feed dramatically increased someone’s traffic AND bottom line. The Guardian example above isn’t proof of anything. Any number of things could have sparked their rise, and they say as much.

I’ve read any number of people who will tell you this is the case but never backing anything up. And yes, I’ve read any number of people who are vocal that because such-and-such site doesn’t have full feeds, or moved away from them, they are no longer reading.

I suspect these people are well in the minority.

What I think is most notable is the growth of Twitter as a feed reading alternative. You rarely hear someone say that Twitter isn’t useful because you can only “feed” 140 characters of your stories. No, Twitter actually seems to have shown that you can get substantial amounts of traffic with just a summary. THAT I can document. I have seen Twitter first hand rise as a referring source over time. Plenty of other sites have reported the same.

So how is it that summaries in RSS are evil that are costing you traffic but summaries in Twitter are not. They don’t add up.

Similarly, with Facebook, often it is only a link that is shared. But just sharing those links more and more is being reported as a big traffic driver.

To me, if you want your content read as widely as possible, full feeds make that happen, because you ensure more people are likely to read in case they don’t click. But I really don’t see summaries as having some type of crippling impact on a site.

Side note: it’s really confusing to be told you can login and comment using your Twitter or some other account here and then still have to make a username and password. That doesn’t same any time. It just makes registration an even worse hassle.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_i d=4e78ba4f8744c93f029d156cbbd1820d&_rend er=rss

We stopped truncating feeds on the blog of one site that I run last November. (The blog is one of the most popular sections of the site.) Since then we’ve seen overall site visits and pageviews drop by about 20%. For us and the brand, it was the right decision to make. But if our business model relied on advertising revenue, I would definitely go back to truncated feeds–as much as I hate, hate, hate them when other people use them.

What evidence does Guardian have that the full feeds cause the bump? Was this the only variable that changed in that time period?

While it’s not easy to measure the direct impact of full content RSS feeds on traffic (which, in fact, has grown dramatically the last 18 months from 25M to 37M monthly uniques), we are very clear about how important it is strategically to be a relevant part of people’s digital experiences wherever that may be.

It was a step toward being able to offer the Open Platform http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform.   The larger intent is about weaving the Guardian into the fabric of the Internet, growing with the market as it grows, and finding new business through the innovations of others.

The Guardian’s Editor Alan Rusbridger presented a vision for journalism at the Cudlipp Lecture recently that demonstrates the value of being more open than closed: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan  /25/cudlipp-lecture-alan-rusbridger