John Gruber (daringfireball.com) charges around $7000 a week for one sponsored RSS article on Sunday and a follow up post thanking the sponsor on Friday. It can be done for small publishers in a tasteful way.

Many websites which rely on paid adds put only the title and first paragraph in the RSS feed with a link to the article. But that notification is pretty convenient, so I'm still willing to use those sites' RSS feeds.

That is a keen observation. I guess rss is a technology from simpler and more explorative times of the internet instead of the current oppressive and commercialized phase we are going through now.

Eh, the surveillance was weaker, but I'm not sure about the commercialization. RSS is from 99/00, the era of Punch The Monkey flash banner ads and dozens of popups and popunders.

From what I can tell, RSS was the equivalent of today's OpenGraph. It was a tool for a company (Netscape) to slurp content into its portal. It's just that AOL then blundered when they bought Netscape and removed support for RSS, which then became a de-facto standard format.

In fact, as RSS popularity wanes, a feed reader that can reader OG tags is probably a good idea.