The economics of RSS
I’ve recently noticed that major blogs aren’t pushing their RSS feeds as much as they used to. A year or so ago Engadget, Gizmodo, Techcrunch etc all gave their RSS feeds substantial real estate in the page header. Not so now.
This trend is most noticable on Gizmodo, the feed link is 3000px down the left sidebar. The RSS option is more prominent on Engadget and TechCrunch as a link in the header but I’m sure these links used to be way more in your face.
I can think of two three reasons for this:
1. Everyone subscribes using the icon in their browser address bar. Possible.
2. These sites don’t want RSS subsribers. I assume, even with ads in their RSS feeds, that big blogs make more money from someone who visits the site everyday than from a subscriber. Could it be that because of this they are no longer encouraging visitors to subscribe?
3. I’m going blind and the sites have always been the same.
