Yahoo fell in love with RSS back in 2004 and 2005.  Everything they did was RSS enabled and they did a lot to bring RSS to the mainstream with tools like My.Yahoo.com.  However, it appears that this love affair is waining in favor of page views.   The majority of Yahoo’s business model is based off advertising which requires readers to come to their website where the ads are visible.  RSS is a great way of distributing and consuming information, but it doesn’t require the user to go back to the mother ship.

The proof of this possible change in strategy?  Steve Rubel points to three new sites launched by Yahoo:  Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV.  All have fantastic use cases for RSS.  None of them have it.

So what does this mean for RSS?  I think it means that instead of companies jumping in with both feet, they will need to evaluate whether RSS makes sense for their model.  Companies that don’t rely on page views to track success will continue to use RSS.  Those that rely on advertising and other monetizing efforts will need to evaluate the pros and cons.

This entry was posted by Josh Kenzer on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Marketing, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.