RSS may go away, but something better will take its place. People put RSS on their blogs for multiple reasons. I use it on mine because it greatly increases t

RSS may go away, but something better will take its place. People put RSS on their blogs for multiple reasons. I use it on mine because it greatly increases the usability of my site. Another way it helps is that it makes sites "stickier"; without RSS, people would not have something automatically telling them "Hey, that site you liked updated! Go check it out!". They would have to either remember the URL, or remember a link path to the site, or bookmark it, and they'd have to periodically check back. (Not that I particularly care—while it is nice to have readers, I write mainly for my own amusement, and my site is not commercialized at all.) And I think that these two factors are a net win for most sites, whether commercial or not. There are ways around the advertising issue—offer truncated feeds, put ads in your feeds, provoke comments, etc. Plus, I thought that the known wisdom was that regular readers don't use ads much, it's the ones that stumble onto your site from Google, etc.? I haven't seen a study, though. Also, for the record, I basically don't check sites that don't offer RSS. If it's particularly good, it'll get bookmarked, and maybe I'll come back to it in a few months when I've got some free time. But most sites don't even get bookmarked. On the other hand, if I find a site that had a good article, I'll often add it to my RSS reader on a trial basis.