Another round of the debates about full-text vs. partial text RSS feeds has begun. Robert Scoble still insists that full-text RSS feeds can be of benefits to both publishers and subscribers. Nowadays, he won’t subscribe to partial feeds. Nick Wilson at Performancing agrees. Duncan at Blog Herald thinks otherwise. What are the benefits and drawbacks of them both?

Before I go into my thoughts about it. I was a fan of partial feeds when the first debate occured. Back then, I was thinking RSS feeds were more like email marketing where you write a paragraph or summary to tease your readers to click-through and read the full text on your website.

When switching to a new blog platform, I thought about the strategy once again and decided to stick with full feed instead. The reason is much the same as the benefit I am going to write below.

Benefits of full-text RSS feeds:

• Save time - You don’t have to click-through before reading the full content. Some people want to scan before actually read the item.
• More likely get read - Less people will click-through unless the summary is utmost interesting. Full text allows readers to scan quickly. If something catch their eyes, they are more likely read.
• Get linked more often - It’s just common sense. The more people reading, the more chances they link to you. Bloggers appreciate those who save their time.
• More popularity and money - More links translate into more referrals and higher search engine rankings, which turn into more traffic and hopefully readers and money. Those depend heavily on your business model though.

Drawbacks of full-text RSS fees: they take more time to download. More bandwidth are wasted each time readers download your feed. Harder to read on small screen devices such as mobile phone and Pocket PC/PDA.

If you hook into the Internet using slower connection such as dial-up, you might think that downloading partial text feed may be more efficient both cost and time wise.

Wrong, you can always leave your RSS aggregators to update your feeds while you are connected. Once you are done, you can read the texts in full and just connect if you want to fetch external pages. You need to do this more often for partial feed, even if you want to read the full content.

As for mobile phone, I would suggest that if your blogs or sites consist of that type of audience, you still publish a full feed but also provide summary of the feed as a second choice. Some blog software don’t have this feature yet, but it should be easy to implement.

Here is a catch: no one has ever tested how partial text feed generate more repeated traffic to your blogs/sites compared to the traffic generated from full-text feed. Moreover, I agree with Scoble that right now RSS subscribers aren’t good targets for loosely-targeted advertising.

Right now, I don’t know any RSS publishers who earn substantial income from RSS advertising. That would certainly change in the future, but we won’t get into that because it is not significant.

Darren Rowse, as usual, posted some of his insights about the debate. Right now he is surveying his readers about which RSS feeds they prefer. He might consider switching to full feed (right now he provides partial feed) temporarily and track his traffic levels, comment levels, incoming links and the amount of sites using his full feeds without permission.

Sources: Scobleizer, Performancing, ProBlogger.