If I find a blog that seems interesting, the first thing I do is look for a feed. If there isn't one or it's just partial, I go somewhere else and I don't look back.

In today's information-overloaded web, the line between being worth my time and being a waste of my time is thinner than you might think.

What you are paying for is the second look.

I totally see this... however I realized as I looked at my RSS feeds, google reader sucks in the whole article, if I really was curious about comments I might go, this is rare. I mean granted you get the second look, now that you subscribed those chances increase. But again, maybe I am totally clueless, but if the reader sucks in the whole article why go to the site. As you said in is world with information overload, why waste my time when I can aggregate all my interests and not go to the site. Here lies my problem, once google puts adsense on their reader , is the blogger getting the cut. Google news shows a snippet of the article, I totally see a synergistic relationship with traffic there, having trouble seeing this for RSS. In this case if google decides to monetize they are really getting away with robbery.

You're right. I do occasionally visit the site, but I normally don't, because it's all in my reader.

Even so, you get these benefits:

> An expanded audience.

As a blogger, I think this is your most important asset. Vastly more important than any money you might get from it. An audience is actual power, and besides: It's not who you know--it's who knows you.

> Word of mouth, because of the first point.

Even if this portion of your audience isn't looking at your ads, if they like what you have to say, some of them are bound to tell other people. These are extra referrals you would not have had otherwise.

This is important because growth by word of mouth is naturally compounded. Over a few years, I bet the difference really builds up.

Now, I don't have any numbers to back this up, but my gut says this stuff will end up earning you more AdSense dollars in the long run than trying to maneuver your audience into captivity.

Just to further explain myself, if I use a free rss reader like google reader and no longer visit a site such as digg, what is the incentive here. Why isn't google sharing their revenue ? I understand with stuff like feedburner you are more than happy to see those subscriptions go up, but what does google reader to for you or the other free ones.

What Dan said, and also, if you don't offer such a convenient feature and your competitors do, then you'll be bleeding users no end. Better to have users getting a feed from your site (leeching bandwidth and not contributing to the community or your revenue in general) than to have them go and get their RSS from a competitor (this would apply more to a Digg style site than a blog of course). You can always monetise the RSS feeds later (Tom's Hardware, I'm looking at you...)

User visits site, likes site. Without RSS user bookmarks it and then forgets to visit the site again. With RSS user adds feed and then gets reminded of site when new articles etc get posted, prompting user to return to the site. RSS increases return traffic.