Editor’s note (March 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2006, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
Back in the mid-2000s, there was an argument in the blogosphere about what at the time seemed like a minor technical dispute. Should publishers offer full RSS feeds or truncated ones? And can RSS advertising ever generate enough revenue to make full broadcasts financially viable? A post on this very site took aim at those who cheerfully advocate full broadcasting without addressing the disturbing economic reality: RSS advertising clearly didn’t pay.
This argument is worth revisiting. Not because the RSS has suddenly returned to the center of digital publishing—it hasn’t—but because the underlying tension it exposed has never gone away. The war on full feeds was never about the RSS. It was about who controls the relationship between creators and viewers, and who makes money from it.
What the original argument was really about
In the early days of blogging, the business for cut tapes was all about the money. Full feeds allow readers to consume your content entirely within their RSS reader, meaning they’ve never visited your site. No site visits meant no ad impressions. No ad impressions meant no revenue. For bloggers trying to make a living – and there weren’t many of them – this was a real problem.
RSS ad networks like Phedo have tried to solve this by embedding ads directly into the feed itself. The theory was sound. In practice, RSS readers were populated almost entirely by tech-savvy, ad-averse early adopters, who were among the least likely demographics on the Internet to click on a banner. The economy never materialized. Publishers that could afford to offer full feeds—large blog networks with strong on-site advertising revenue—did so. Everyone else was trying to use clipped feeds to drive traffic to pages where traditional display ads could generate a few cents per thousand impressions.
The gist of the argument was this: good user experience costs money, and someone needs to understand where that money is coming from.
Same argument, different clothes
Fast-forward twenty years, and that tension plays out on a bigger stage. Platforms and technologies have changed, but the fundamental question has not.
Today’s version of the full tape discussion takes place in email newsletters. Publishers are once again asking audiences whether to give audiences a complete, beautifully formatted newsletter that they can read cover to cover in their inbox, or to use content as bait, driving readers to a website where more conventional monetization can occur.
The email newsletter industry saw a major shift in monetization strategy in 2025, with sponsored content emerging as the preferred revenue model, while paid subscription adoption stagnated. According to InboxReads’ annual State of the Newsletter report, 77% of newsletters said they were interested in sponsorships and advertising partnerships – the first year that more newsletter mailings offered sponsorships than ad revenue declined.
In other words: newsletters have largely solved the monetization problem that defeats RSS advertising. The sponsored newsletter format places advertising directly into the content itself in a way that readers will accept and advertisers will value. This is the model that RSS ad networks have been searching for since 2006, which can finally be realized by a format that readers actually open and engage with.
46% of newsletter experts agree that newsletters generate ad revenue faster than podcasts, videos or websites. That’s a surprising claim, and it points to something real: advertising performs better when audiences are connected, engaged, and read in a distraction-free environment. The RSS ad networks of the early 2000s were right on this principle. They were just using the wrong container.
The economics of owned audiences
What the fully taped discussions also communicated was the value of owning your audience directly. Bloggers relying on RSS were dependent on a distribution layer they didn’t control. Readers consuming content through Google Reader (later shut down in 2013) or Bloglines were, in an important sense, Google’s audience or Bloglines’ audience, not the blogger’s.
It took a long time to learn this lesson, but it has now become one of the central tenets of his creative strategy. While every social platform struggles with algorithm volatility, changing content policies, and AI-curated feeds, email continues to do what it’s always done: reliably reach subscribers through creator-owned distribution.
In 2006, bloggers struggling with full feeds were unknowingly struggling with a version of the same problem. They wanted to serve their readers as well as possible—complete feeds really are a better reading experience—while maintaining the economic relationships that make publishing sustainable. This is still a problem expressed through different platforms and different tools.
Publishers are working to diversify their revenue, and few say the vast majority of their revenue comes from advertising this year. Display advertising as an independent model has been languishing for years. The steady decline of display advertising as a revenue stream for digital publishers has pushed creators toward the kinds of direct, permission-based audience connections that email makes possible.
The trap of waiting for technology to pay off
A mistake seen in old RSS advertising discussions, and still made today, is to assume that if you wait long enough, distribution technology will eventually be cost-effective. It won’t happen, definitely. Technologies can be loved by users and completely useless for monetization. The problem is not patience; fits.
RSS advertising failed because the ad networks didn’t try hard enough, but RSS readers were a structurally hostile environment for the type of advertising that paid reliably at the time. Cut ribbons were a solution that degraded the user experience without ever generating a return that justified the tradeoff. The correct answer – it took another decade and a half for the industry to find – was a completely different format.
Today’s equivalent is the assumption that social media has reached a point where it will eventually translate into steady, proprietary income. For most creators, it won’t, or at least not directly. Platforms control distribution, change their algorithms without warning, and extract most of the advertising value for themselves. The lesson from the RSS era is that if the economics of a particular channel don’t work, the answer is usually to find a better channel rather than forever optimizing on a broken channel.
What this means for publishers now
The war over full feeds ended in irrelevance, not victory: RSS never found a business model, social media rose to fill the distribution gap, and most publishers moved on. But the main argument about content access, audience ownership and monetization was never resolved. He just moved.
The most honest version of the lesson for bloggers and independent publishers today is this: the technology you put out is less important than the relationship you build with the people who read you. Complete tapes were attractive because they served readers well. Email newsletters work financially because they serve both readers and advertisers well, but only if the content is actually worth subscribing to.
Newsletters that feature personal reviews and hot takes generate the highest open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This isn’t advice for content strategy—it’s a reminder that the economics of publishing always reward a different point of view. The RSS discussion was about how, for all its technicalities, you could finally have voice online without having to figure out how to pay for it. This question has not changed. There are only tools to answer it.
