Davis Freeberg

Blogonomics: RSS Feeds

These are all good reasons for why you should publish a full RSS feed, but I think that the biggest reason why it ends up generating more page views has to do with people clicking on the links inside the story.

Most of the links that sites like FT include in their articles ends up going directly back to the FT site. When I read my RSS reader, if something is really long, I'll usually click the headline and read the full story, but more times then not, I'm actually more interested in the links inside the story. If I can see the whole article and the journalist references a past article then, I'm 1,000% more likely to go read that past article, then had that link not shown up in my RSS reader at all.

Too often sites want to protect their content, but by being smart about where and how they link to their content, they can end up driving traffic to other journalists or back to their own stuff. Engadget is good at doing this, but the MSM seems to prefer no link over linking to anybody (including themselves).