If you’re a publisher working with outside.in, you’ve likely received an email from Chrysanthe or me asking you to send us a ‘full text feed.’  We’re asking for you to publish the entirety of your stories through your RSS Feeds as opposed to just the first couple of lines. I’d like to clarify why we’re making this request and why we think it’s important for all publishers to do.

First off, we want you to understand that outside.in is not using your full text feed to publish your entire story on our site or on any of our partner sites.  We only publish the headline as a link and the first two lines of the article.  Our goal is to help readers find your stories and then send them to you.

So, why do we ask for your full text? Our automatic GeoTagger works by scanning stories for location cues. If we can’t see the whole story, we’re much less likely to see the necessary cues and GeoTag it.  Then we can’t do our job: organizing your content by location and exposing it to local readers who care about it.  So, full text feeds help us GeoTag your stories, put them on your StoryMap, distribute them, and get more traffic to you.

You should also know that outside.in’s distribution is not the only traffic-increasing reason for you to publish full text feeds.

In a post entitled “Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full text feeds work,” Eric Scoble explains that a primary source of traffic for blogs is ‘connectors’: journalists, bloggers, and cultural mavens who consume a lot of content and link to it.  These traffic drivers use feed readers to sift through much more content than the average consumer.  If publishers make it easy for connectors to read their content by putting the full stories in the feeds, then publishers are more likely to receive the benefit of links from connectors.  What you might lose in ad revenue by enabling connectors to read your content without generating ad impressions on your site, you more than make up for by the traffic you get directly to your site when the connectors distribute your permalinks.

Perhaps you don’t like Eric Scoble and don’t want to take his word for it. In that case, I’d like to point you to TechDirt‘s assertion that full text feeds increase pageviews.  Here’s an excerpt from their post:

Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers…

Need some data to back that up?  See Digital Inspiration‘s Do You Publish Full Text Feeds Or Partial Text Feeds? in which they display some very telling charts detailing how readership grows when full text feeds are employed.

You might notice that those three articles are from a couple of years ago.  The authors saw the benefit of full text feeds even before it became easy to monetize your feeds with services like FeedBurner’s Ad Network.

Those are the reasons why we at outside.in are bugging you for full text feeds.

Please leave questions and disputes in the comments.

Also, I still haven’t found good tutorials on how to ensure you are publishing the full text in your feed.  Before I go and make them myself, can anyone recommend good guides on publishing full text feeds through popular CMS and blog platforms?  That would be most excellent.