The title piqued my interest… I clicked, and found just one more line...

Sounds familiar?

While RSS is becoming more popular there are still many sites that provide useless RSS feeds. Really what is the use of providing a RSS feed that includes just one more line of the “article” that you are trying to lure me too? I find this especially frustrating when you are trying to use RSS (offline) on a mobile device.

So what could be the reason that a site would create RSS feeds with just one more line of text? Are they just that confident that it would only take that one extra line for me to click one more time? Or do they have bandwidth concerns?... No, that would be plain silly as RSS files are very lean. Perhaps these sites are concerned that another website might want to use the RSS file as content?... No that does not make sense either as it contains the link back which, just as the RSS file itself, attempts to generate more traffic. Furthermore, having your link on other sites helps your SEO.

Maybe they just don't understand the full marketing power of RSS, and they just look at it as the next evolved version of the newsletter... No that does not make sense either, because these sites provide much more informative newsletters with much more text than they provide in their RSS feeds...

Can somebody help me understand? ...It would be so nice if I could read more interesting RSS files, offline, on my mobile device during my commute...