Micro Persuasion points out, rightly, Yahoo! has been sending very mixed messages about RSS feeds.  I moved over to Google Reader last month because MyYahoo! would not export my RSS Feeds.  Everyone else does support that - except Yahoo.  Why?  They're just in it for the money - eyeballs.

And now we're coming to the issue of what RSS does …… it allows me, and any other subscriber to view content in the way (and place) I want it …… which might well be in a feed reader that's not on one of Yahoo's sites. 

No "eyeballs" …. no washy…     I guess Yahoo really is just about making money …. they want you to go to their properties and stay - for a long time …

So….with that goal in mind….. to quote Steve 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."

"….My gut feeling is that Yahoo is trying to create content that you can only get on their sites and nowhere else. It's all very Lloyd Braun. They want consumers spending as much time as possible on their properties. If they put RSS feeds on these sites, it will mean fewer page views because people will only click in on content that they really care about. In other words, it means less time spent. Browsing and clicking creates page views. By skipping RSS, they will serve up more ads.

Could this be the beginning of a larger trend?"

Yes, but not for most sites …… just some publishers.   And you have to wonder if Yahoo is going against the trend…….everything is going away from going to the the site ….since you can get most of it in the RSS Reader - or whatever your using.

However, reading content in an RSS reader also presents Web Metrics issues - as it's hard, with Caching done by the Internet Providers and perhaps, by the Search Engines, to know exactly how much your content is being consumed.  

At least, when people came to your site directly - you got eyeballs AND stats …you knew how many people were on the site, more or less, and what they're doing.   Now…..it's much harder since a lot of the activity is happening in the RSS Reader.  In other words, the revenue models in place don't really deal with content that's consumed off your site - that you can't measure.

And yes, there's workarounds, like putting ads in the RSS feeds, but it's not universally adopted and many people don't want to see or deal with Ads in their RSS Feed Reader - I see them in Google Reader a lot …but I'd never click on them.