Is Having an RSS Feed Just Giving Content Away for Free?

Chris Coyier is thinking in an article on CSS-Tricks about RSS:

Don’t you want people to read your stuff? Having an RSS feed is saying, “I’m happy to meet you where you are. If you like reading stuff over there, then great, read it over there. I just like it when you read my stuff.”

But even when you don’t want to use RSS to “give content away for free”, you can still use RSS to let readers know when there’s new content on your site.

When I discover an interesting site and there’s an RSS feed, I might subscribe to it to stay up-to-date. But if your site doesn’t have one, I might visit your site once, but then forget about it and visit it never again. So even if you need the pageviews to generate ad-income (you could embedded static ads in your feed too, though…), it would still be better to provide support for RSS feeds, to make life of your visitors easier and probably keep them visiting your site again.

https://css-tricks.com/is-having-an-rss-feed-just-giving-content-away-for-free/

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