> Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers 
   > were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, 
   > with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles.

yes, but that can be helpful as well: spiegel online (biggest german news site) has feeds for every subtopic; for an example for every sport an own feed.

i subscribe to ~20 of this subtopics and i'm sure i will never miss an article about one of that topics.

> The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it.

Google (partly) killed it (by pulling people into Google Reader and then killing Google Reader).

Most (all?) news sites still offer RSS feeds.

I wonder how many blog sites have a large number of RSS users and don’t even know they have an RSS feed. Most Wordpress sites have an RSS feed at ./feed, but many of the sites I follow don’t actually have an RSS link offered as an option.

I wonder if Firefox could help fix the problem by putting RSS/Atom discovery into the browser in a prominent way.

It’s there, pick Customise from the menu and drag the RSS icon into the bar. But they’re not interested in actively working on it – suggested features like hiding it instead of greying it out based on feed presence are closed due to a lack of interest. I think ideally they’re want it to be an extension.

"in a prominent way"

Don't they have that already? I remember it being a prominent feature for browsers ~10 years ago. Heck, even Outlook had a feed reader - still has it I think, though it's always sucked.

Firefox used to show a custom page when an RSS feed was displayed, but it doesn't seem to work any more.

Edit: it didn't seem to work earlier, but is working now after I added the RSS subscriptions button.

>The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it.

Huh? There's no such inability.

GP probably meant targeted ads, beyond just 'well if you like this feed,'...

You could have a identifiable feed URL. Static, personalised ads that most feed readers wouldn't block.

And in terms of technology, there's nothing stopping you sticking an iframe or script block in your feed. It comes back to what the reader will allow. Origin really doesn't matter too much.

If you use a web reader, I think you don't even need an unique url if your ads are static images. Just request an image from your server and use the user cookie for recommendations

Yep, most of the centralized web is a massive direct marketing platform.