RSS Feeds: Should You? Shouldn't You?

I have been using Google Reader as my feed reader for quite some time now. I must have got almost 40-50 feeds that I read daily on my mobile phone. One of those blogs is "A Public Galaxy of My Thoughts", which is maintained by my dear friend Rathz, who normally prefers to write about the north-eastern sector of India, mostly Assam. I had noticed quite some time ago that he had not allowed his readers to read the posts on their feed readers. They are just supposed to receive notifications every time he makes an update. Well, I did visit him everytime I got a notification 'coz, after all, he's a dear chum. However, it finally got onto my nerves one day and finally commented about it on his last post. When asked for explanation, he says :

....regarding the feeds, i hav the settings as such..
i want to bring ppl to my page so tht they xplore into the previous posts.

I used to debate on whether I should let my readers taste just a whisker and lure them to my blog page or just allow them to read the whole post on their readers. Well, the very fact that Rathz simply refuses to allow his readers to read his works until they reach his page, actually jarred that old conflict of mine. I thought, why not try a market research on this topic? I myself am a newbie on the blogosphere. I felt, it's much better if I sought the answers from the gurus themselves. After quite a bit of scourging the net and overusing the Yahoo search bar, I did end up with some interesting points. While it was clear that majority of the population prefers full feeds, there are still a few who feel partial contents are the way to go. So, here I put forward all the advantages and disadvantages of full feeds at your perusal. It's upto you to decide, now, which way would you prefer.

Why shouldn't you broadcast complete content via RSS feeds?

1. Most of the people feel that if they offer full feeds then no one shall ever bother to visit their pages, thus reducing their revenues from AdSense and other similar advertising programs.
2. There are many bloggers who take every pain possible to make their sites look state of the art. Some of them feel discouraged if their designs and hard work go unnoticed.
3. Actually, there are only above two (credible anough) points that I could figure out. :-P

Why should you broadcast complete content via RSS feeds?

1. As far as advertisements are concerned, most people use AdBlock (with FireFox) or some other similar plug ins that enable the browsers not to load the advertisements at all. So, even if readers do happen to visit your page, they won't be checking out your ad links at all.
2. If you are still keen to earn , you can always put up advertisements on your feeds.
3. Since you allow bots and feed readers from various other sites to crawl into your content, you get more exposure and it even improves your rankings among the search engines.
4. There are a lot of times when blog service providers are down due to maintenance. Well, feed readers are still able to download your posts and cater toy our readers.
5. Most readers find it a PITA (pain in the ***) to have to click on an external link to be able to read your post, if you don't have your full feeds switched on.
6. This one decides it all at the end of the day, I feel. Despite belonging to a developed society, continuous connectivity is still not a reality for a lot of us. Especially in cases of dial ups, where you need to pay by the minute, your readers would rather prefer to download all your updates at once and then read them offline, at their own leisure.

So, what do you say? Do you have your RSS feeds turned on to broadcast full content or partial?

Sources:

• Do Full Feeds Increase Your RSS Subscriber Count? by ProBlogger
• Do You Publish Full Text Feeds Or Partial RSS Feeds? on Digital Inspiration
• Should I Offer Full Text RSS Feeds Or Not? on Mike's Quarter

Hooray! Increased Feed Subscribers on Labyrinth!!

(Click to enlarge)

Wow! It seems all my hard work is finally paying off. I can't believe sprucing up my blog page would fetch me so many subscribers, and that too overnight. It was just yesterday that I had installed the menu bar at the top, gotten the links work fine and even asked George to help me out with the header.

The picture above is a summary of my feed subscribers for today, as charted by FeedBurner, my RSS feed management service. Even until yesterday, the maximum subscribers I'd ever had was 16. I was pleasantly shocked to find that it has increased to 27, today. As is pretty apparent in the above report for today's activities on my page, I've gotten the highest subscriber today, in the past 30 days. I can see I have 80% new visitors on my page and people have actually started to reach my page searching for terms like "sort my inbox", "mozilla" and "problogger" (that was a shocker, especially because the site itself gets a huge turnout as compared to mine, where it's mention only in my blogroll.

Well, what can I say? I love Google and I love FeedBurner (which incidentally is again a Google service, now). I'm now just keeping my fingers crossed while anticipating the reaction from all you readers, after I get the revamped look of my blog, live!