Windows Phone Thoughts: RSS Changes: The Full Feed Experiment

We've changed our RSS feed here at Pocket PC Thoughts, because I wanted to try an experiment. Since RSS became popular, there's always been the tension between publisher and reader. The reader wants to take full advantage of RSS, meaning they want to get 100% of the content in their RSS reader so they don't have to visit the site. This is even more important on mobile devices, where the lightweight RSS protocol works nicely. From a publishers point of view (the person running the Web site), putting 100% of their content in an RSS feed is risky, because it means if people aren't visiting the Web site, they're not letting banner ads load, clicking on them, etc. And that can mean reduced revenue. So the tension remains: the publishers want to stay in business, the readers want the content.

RSS-based advertising is one solution: it allows the publishers to have a revenue model, and the reader to still get the content. So here's the experiment I'm trying with Pocket PC Thoughts: we've changed our RSS feed to offer not only full text, but also images. This gives you a very rich RSS experience, but that experience is subsidized by a single advertisement at the bottom of each RSS item. Ideally I want to see one ad per item, but it seems FeedBurner doesn't have enough ads for me yet. ;-) I'm going to let this experiment run for two weeks, and monitor our traffic levels, income levels, and the impact it has on our site, forums, and community. If things go well, we'll keep it all full-feed and roll this change out to Smartphone Thoughts and Digital Media Thoughts. If it's a failure (remember, this is what I do for a living, bills need to get paid) we'll go back to the old method of partial feeds that are ad-free. Comments welcome.