i noticed this afternoon I am only getting small snippets of Techcrunch.com in Google Reader. Even just this morning, I could read entire articles and see the pictures with no problem.

Is the problem with just Google reader, or is Techcrunch limiting what they are sending out in Feeds? I hope this is temporary.

TonyB

I am seeing Partial feeds too!!

and too those interested in taking a peek into techcrunch stats..heres the linky

http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s26techcrunch

Full feeds are back.

TonyB

This does bring up a question. Do sites that are read via a feed get any credit for that when it comes to traffic counts?

Tony

It's nearly impossible to count visits when you publish a full feed, I'd say...

It's my understanding that sites have statistics as to how many feeds are subscribed to them. Does that carry any weight when it comes to advertisers or just bragging rights?

I love full feeds as a reader, but I can imagine how sites would want the actual click through to the actual site.

Tony

TOny its very simple. Take the Feedburner stats for Techncrunch which currently indicates about 126K subscribers. Now take the actual page views for this Site its about 46K page views for a day.

A thin slice of data for Oct/12th indicates two posting that occured on techncrunch. This means that 126K readers actually obtained content (twice) . So a total of approx 250K reads.

However, when you look at this this and compare to page views/visits , techcrunch is only obtaining 20% traction from his readers. So this means only 20% of TC readers are seeing the Ad's and not the full 126K readers!! :)-

data is open for ratinalization :)-

Thanks /PD.

So if only 20% of the readers see the ads, what motivation would any site that cares about traffic count or ads provide a full feed?

Tony

TonyB: Mainly, (I think) it's to maintain readership. A large readership begets an even bigger audience. A lot of people just take you off their reading list if you only publish snippets.

Realistically, the people reading you via an RSS reader who don't click through to the main site, wouldn't have clicked the adds there anyway.

I read Blogoscoped via the full feed, but I still click through to the site for interesting articles (mainly to see the comments). That said, I never click adds (sorry Philip!).

Reto : But the vertical of ads, is also be impressions. (CPM) CPM is "cost per thousand" ad impressions, an industry standard measure for selling ads on Web sites.

Only the dimbo cliks on ads and then this counts as as part of the click through rate :)-

With RSS reader software, there's..
- those that poll the feed once an hour for 1,000s of subscribers, thus lowering the numbers
- those that poll the feed once an hour 1 subscriber, thus increasing the numbers!

That was one reason why I didn't have full feeds from the beginning on – it makes it harder for me to see who's around here and how many. Interestingly enough I couldn't see any real changes in traffic when I went from partial feed to full feed.

One solution I guess would be to include a counter image into every post (like a transparent 1x1 pixel GIF/PNG). You still wouldn't know which post would be read exactly (just like I can't tell when people just visit the frontpage).

Of course, the fact that some people don't click on ads makes ya think which other making-money solutions there are. I can think of a few...
- paid honest posts disclaimed as such (e.g. a paid review, but there is no guideline whether the review ends up positive or negative)
- ad posts (simply an item inside the RSS/ the frontpage which is an ad by someone else, e.g. an image ad)
- donations (I've mentioned before that I'd only do this if people would donate for past posts, not future ones... you don't wanna end up with "1,000 bosses" like Kottke once put it!)
- do other websites on the side and let them be commercial and the blog be non-commercial
- different ad positioning, like ads on top of the content for each post, or inside the post itself (can end up noisy!)

Without GamesfortheBrain.com I probably would not be able to maintain this blog as full-time job right now... of all the sites outside Google Blogoscoped, GamesfortheBrain is the only one that does well in terms of AdSense (not sensational, but good).