Based on a lot of feedback (including my own), Alley Insider decided to go from partial to full RSS feeds.  As a publisher, Henry "had trouble understanding how we were supposed to survive if we not only gave our content away but didn't even ask anyone to visit the site." I made the point that most of the bloggers who follow content are more likely to do so so through syndicated feed. I think it's reasonable to say that a link from a couple of bloggers is worth more than displaying an ad to them, and if your full content is available in an aggregator, bloggers are quite simply more likely to link to it. I have relatively low readership, but even if 1% of my readers click through the link I'm sending 5 people to your site instead of one.

Syndication lets the customer control the conversation and we will gladly reward you with our loyalty for that control. In the long run, our loyalty is so much more valuable than an extra click-through. Quite simply, the immediate spike in traffic by forcing people to click-through is incredibly short-sighted. I’d also note that when you publish a partial feed your content is not available in offline scenarios  - no internet connection means no clickthrough.

The other point I would make is that the people most likely to click on an ad are those who arrive via search engine. People who arrive through a syndicated feed are already in the mindset that they want to view your content, while those who arrive from a search engine are in the "seeking" mindset. The latter have proven much more likely to click on an ad they view as contextual. I make close to nothing with the Google Ads I have on this site, but I've actually seen a performance improvement by eliminating ads across the site and only displaying them on the individual post pages. Because I publish full feeds, the majority of traffic on these pages is from Google searches as opposed to clickthroughs from my 500 readers (a number I would imagine would shrink dramatically if I started publishing partial feeds... since I know *I* would unsubscribe!). It actually works in my benefit to have less impressions because the CTR is higher because I'm only showing ads to people who are more likely to click on the ads.

Mike makes the same case on TechDirt.

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, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two. So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage.

Henry and co. haven't been blogging too long, but I'd be curious to hear how the decision to publish full feeds have affected their traffic and their revenue.