Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion is wondering Why Yahoo is backing away from RSS.

“Has anyone noticed that Yahoo’s love affair with RSS seems to be withering?” asks Rubel. “In the past few weeks Yahoo has rolled out three major new web sites – Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV. They’re great sites, but none of them has feeds. There’s a reason why – eyeballs.”

“Yahoo is trying to create content that you can only get on their sites and nowhere else,” adds Rubel. “Browsing and clicking creates page views. By skipping RSS, they will serve up more ads……Could this be the beginning of a larger trend?”

Rubel’s comments raise the question, “Do your RSS feeds cost you money?”

This issue is important to consider, because of the fact that podcasting is built on the RSS 2.0 standard.

If your site uses AdSense or other means to generate income from page views, it’s clear that you’ll lose some ad revenue to people that view your content in a news reader. The question then becomes one of whether the benefits of providing RSS feeds outweigh the loss of page views.

For most podcasters, the benefits of providing clearly marked RSS feeds will greatly outweigh the risks. While news reader users may cost you some page view ad revenue, this is likely to be minute. While news readers are popular among bloggers, they haven’t become popular among the general population.

On the other hand, RSS feeds have become the lingua franca of the blogosphere. By providing feeds and pinging sites like ping-o-matic, you initiate a dialog with both other Web publishers and search engines and other aggregators that can help drive traffic to your site. For podcasters, RSS feeds are especially critical, because feed subscribers account for a huge portion of most podcasts’ downloads.

Your podcast MP3 files have a life independent from both your podcast feed and your site. If you’re trying to make money from your podcast, each element – your MP3s, your feed, and your site – need to be considered both individually and collectively.
For a top site like Yahoo!, RSS feeds may be optional. Most users probably won’t miss them.

For bloggers and podcasters, though – publish RSS feeds or perish. The loss of a little ad revenue to news reader users pales in comparison to the benefits of becoming an active participant in the blogosphere.