This post is directed at all those folks who read GeekDad and GeekMom via RSS feeds. If you don’t know what that means, read this, and if it piques your interest, check out Feedly.
We have to make a change to our RSS feeds. Ever since we moved away from Wired, we’ve run full posts in our RSS feeds, so people could read them completely in their feed reader apps. The problem for us, from a business angle, is that anytime you read a post via RSS, it doesn’t count in our Analytics, meaning we don’t have an accurate count on how many reads certain posts are getting, which is vital in blogging. We also can’t serve any ads (I know, not the worst thing for you, but it’s what keeps us afloat).
So, we’ve made the decision to restrict the RSS feed to excerpts from the posts, starting Monday. There are actually a lot of people who prefer this format anyway. But what it means is that, if you’re interested in a GeekDad story from its title, featured image, and excerpts, you’ll just have to click though to read it as a whole on GeekDad.com. In most feed readers, this is a simple process, and won’t cause you any more effort. For us, it means we get accurate data, and have the opportunity to connect with you more directly.
We know that, on the internet, change is usually bad. But, hopefully, this isn’t too big a deal. In the long run, it’ll really help us out. Thanks so much for reading GeekDad and GeekMom, and here’s to many more years!
I highly doubt I’ll go to the trouble of clicking through to many articles, but I would be interested in a paid subscription RSS of the full text articles, if the cost were fairly low.
I agree with Scott, highly unlikely to click, but I’d be ok with ads on the feed, not sure why you said it can’t be done because it can.
As long as you don’t have resource hogging adds that cause the page to take forever to load, I’ll click thorough. So far Geekdad’s haven’t been a problem.
I finally dropped CBR.com from my feed because their ads kept getting more and more invasive.
I’m not one who would prefer this format, but it’s not clear from the current rss feed that there’s more information available with a click through. That’s likely harder to implement, but the time when someone is going to click through is more likely to be at the end of the post and not the beginning.
Not going to be a problem for myself. I normally would click through just so I could leave a comment if I wanted to. =)