Full content or summaries? Nearly every blogger has asked his or her self that question at some point. Which is better? There’s no answer to that. The correct question would be “which is better for you?”
Full Content
- A lot of users prefer full content feeds because they can stay in their feed reader and avoid visiting actual websites. Some people even refuse to subscribe to summarized feeds.
- Full feeds make it easier for people to scrape your content. What’s feed scraping? It’s when someone republishes the full content of your posts on their website (automatically) without your permission and proceeds to make money off advertisements on the site.
Summaries
- If you use summarized feeds, you force your readers to hop over to your blog to read the full content. This means the users will see your cool layout, they may post comments, and they could even net you some ad revenue.
- Summarized feeds are smaller, loading quicker and putting less strain on your web server.
I only offer summarized feeds (I can hear the boo-ing already…), though you can offer either or both types of feeds. Personally, I, as a feed subscriber, don’t care which feed-type is available on a site. I use the MyNT RSS reader, so I read feeds a bit differently than most people.
In the end, it’s up to you (just ignore the complaints from your loud summary-hating readers 
). Offer a summary feed, a full feed, or both.
