What Disadvantages Does RSS Have For People Creating Feeds?
The feed creator has an additional outlet to maintain. However, programs are available to automatically create RSS feeds from other sources such as text files or web page files. As far as I know, there is no method of discovering how many subscribers an RSS feed has. This is a very serious problem if a feed contains advertisements, since advertisers obviously want to know the number of subscribers in order to negotiate an appropriate payment. It may be possible to determine the number of subscribers to an RSS feed by examining the server’s logs if you have access to them but that subject is beyond my level of knowledge. At present, RSS is not widely known among the general public. This situation is however changing fairly rapidly at the moment. Publicising RSS feeds is difficult for small unknown organisations. Organisations with a prominent Internet presence can publicise their RSS feeds on their web sites and in their email newsletters.
