Why Yahoo is Backing Away from RSS

Has anyone noticed that Yahoo's love affair with RSS seems to be withering? In 2004 and 2005 Yahoo was all over feeds. It was an early leader in driving adoption, as a matter of fact. But in recent months I question whether they remain committed to RSS as a platform.

This is more than conjecture. 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.

First, think of the lost opportunity here. The food site should have an RSS feed for recipes. The TV site could have streamed programming listings with feeds. And the advertising site should take all of those great insights they're now getting from the ANA and package them into feeds. What's worse is the advertising site has podcasts that you can't even subscribe to! (See comments - you can subscribe to the podcasts)

All of this is a bit of a head scratcher. Why is Yahoo, a site that had been an ardent promoter of RSS, now seemingly putting it all on the back burner? They shipped three heavily promoted sites without feeds. This isn't an oversight. It's deliberate. Something bigger is going on here.

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?

::Later: more from Rafat Ali on Yahoo's eyeball strategy and from W.B. Macnamara, who reminds us that the media is still all about pageviews.