Until your favorite blogs realize that RSS is just a money sink and shut down their feeds, which is exactly what Google is subtly prophesying and no one seems to get.

> RSS is just a money sink

You guys are missing the most obvious point and the big boys have already figured it out. Subscribe to Engadget, Gizmodo, etc.

What you'll get is an excerpt of the story with a "click this link to read the rest".

After I click, I'm on their site. I want to read/post comments? I'm on their site.

RSS is free advertising for content providers and a way to get more eyeballs. Google is foolish for putting all of their eggs in the social basket.

I don't subscribe to feeds that don't syndicate full posts. The last few years, many feeds have switched to paid membership or putting separate ad posts in the stream, "This week RSS is brought to you by X". I'm fine with either of those solutions.

I subscribe to arstechnica because they have a meaningful, long blurb. If I like it I'm going to read the whole thing.

> What you'll get is an excerpt of the story with a "click this link to read the rest".

I remember like... what, six years ago? when people were arguing over whether or not this was an evil thing to do.

This might sound crazy to you, but many blogs are primarily about broadcasting information, rather than showing ads. From that perspective, having a feed is a no-brainer.

RSS feeds can be monetized. For example, Daring Fireball [1] sells weekly 'sponsored posts' on the RSS feed, in addition to selling ads on the site.

[1] http://daringfireball.net

And a lot of FeedBurner feeds show AdSense ads in the body of the feed. (I've seen them on Scott Adams' blog and FreethoughtBlogs.)

500,000+ potential reach without having to scream over social media noise doesn't seem like a money sink to me.

Yahoo! Pipes solves that problem ;)

I'm sorry, what? RSS is a money sink in what way? RSS is about as maintenance free as it gets.

Because it potentially diverts eyeballs away from your actual site. Not because of technology costs.

It's the best of a lot of worse options. Social media is a shouting match, and newsletters are either spam filtered or ignored. People don't want to ignore it, but email is just a bad way to follow a lot of things. RSS readers offer a nice, compact list of all the things you want to read.

I don't know what the click through rate is like on RSS feeds with a statistically useful subscriber count, but Google Reader says my feed has 11 subscribers, meaning those 3 people who came through on my last post are 27%. I don't get that kind of click through with hundreds of real people following my Twitter accounts, or thousands on G+. A million social media followers is meaningless if only 10,000 of them click your links, and any publisher with sense realizes that. Email is only slightly better: http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benc...