Troubled by the prospect of giving away their content shorn of advertising, many publishers haven't yet grappled with increasing consumer demand that they offer syndication feeds so viewers can download stories directly into their RSS readers. A few are now experimenting by offering their own reader, with the help of developer Consenda, testing a new application called NewsPoint, according to MediaPost. Currently only about one in twenty internet users employs an RSS reader to view content, but that number has been climbing quickly. Publishers lose some inventory by allowing viewers to use RSS, exchanging web pageviews for generally adless hits to their RSS files. But those RSS readers then can click into stories to get more detail, creating web impressions that generally involve higher than average reader interest.

MarketingVOX's RSS feed, for example, gets about 1,200 unique readers a day according to the measurement service FeedBurner. Only half of that number actually click onto the site in a given day based on interest in a particular news story. But they generally click on a few stories before leaving and generate ad inventory roughly equal to that probably lost to RSS views. Advertisers may find the audience quality slightly better for the whole process, as more readers have self-selected themselves based on the story content. Uncountable are the readers of the RSS feed who otherwise wouldn't have bothered to check the site daily without an RSS feed.