• Reuters, Thursday, March 11, 2010 2:38 PM

As a self-described "defender of full RSS feeds," Reuters' Felix Salmon is wondering why Gawker Media just truncated its feeds. Gawker head Nick Denton said in a blog comment that "this was a commercial decision," and that, "Gawker Media is an ad-supported company ... RSS ads have never realized their potential ... it is in our interest for people to click through if enticed by an excerpt." Still, according to Salmon, "There's no evidence at all that truncating your RSS feeds results in higher traffic, and indeed there's quite a strong case to be made that it works the other way around."

Salmon goes on to speculate that the change was the result of a recent reshuffle at the top of the Gawker masthead. "That move was largely an attempt to move Gawker away from being a big blog and towards competing directly with the likes of nytimes.com for serious online traffic ... And while it's pretty standard for blogs of all sizes to have full RSS feeds, it's also very uncommon for big news sites to have full RSS feeds."

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