Why we’ve truncated posts in our RSS feed

If you’re the average TNW reader, you probably haven’t noticed, but earlier this week we started limiting the length of posts in our RSS feed to 150 words.

I say “if you’re the average TNW reader” because the popularity of RSS has declined over the years. (Some people have taken offense at this assumption and I’m too bored to join the ‘RSS is dead’ versus ‘RSS is thriving’ discussion so screw it, I’ll cross out that line) Most people find our articles through social media, search and coming to our site directly. So, the number of people who will be affected by this is likely to be relatively small, but if you read us via RSS you certainly deserve an explanation.

As a publisher we have to continually review how we offer our content and what we get in return for it. That means experimenting with features, seeing how they perform and tweaking based on the feedback we receive.

We’re proud of what we publish on The Next Web and believe we deserve something in return for it. So we’re offering two options:

1. You can treat our regular RSS feeds as a ‘taster’ of an article, and click through to see the full thing. This isn’t just about us wanting you to see ads (although that certainly helps us!), by clicking through you get to see our articles exactly as their authors intended them, complete with the opportunity to comment on them and read comments from other readers.
2. You can get a full RSS feed as part of TNW Pro. We haven’t made a big deal about this package yet but you’ll also get to read our site ad-free and be able to use a very nice feature on our pages that shows the world when you’ve shared one of our articles. Want to try it out? Here, have a 30-day free trial.

We’ll keep giving a full feed to services like Flipboard, so your experience there won’t be affected.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on our RSS feeds, and please give TNW Pro a try.

➤ TNW Pro

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