I’ve seen so many discussions on RSS, wether it’s good or bad, an asset or a necessary evil for bloggers. There are a lot of comments like “It causes people not to visit your site, resulting in less traffic”. This is totally true and if you think this is bad, you’re probably not making a lot of money anyway.

For a blogger there is nothing that is more important than his readers. Weather you write 3 line blurb entries or 10 paragraph long scientific analysis papers, the goal is to get readers who like your stuff. In other words, content is king right? So if 100 people come to your site daily, but 10,000 print your articles on toiletpaper and enjoy them on the loo, who cares, that’s 10,000 readers. Tell 10,000 people to buy something and many of them will, resulting in affiliate payments, revenue and whatnot, regardless of the medium they read it in.

For most people RSS is a problem because if thousands read RSS and no one comes to the site, they can’t put up ads. Well bummer, but until blogging there was no other choice than to go paper, and there were still a lot of people making money on it.

One other thing is, that I write for my readers. Yes, I want to make money, yes, I’d love people to flock to my site and get Google to buy it out from under me for millions, but in the end it’s still the readers who can make this all happen. I don’t much care where people read my blog as long as they do, and enjoy themselves. No, I’m not being nice, this is just business awareness