I'm often asked, where's the payoff with RSS? What's the revenue model?

For some strange reason, I've never struggled with this question. It's obvious; the payoff [for internal business use] is time. RSS is a time manufacturing system—a concept that few technologies provide. What's the revenue model for for SMTP (the email protocol)? Does anyone ponder the revenue model of a commercial jet? How about a power drill? These are each technologies that manufacture time—RSS is no different.

As an accountant (with degree-related emphasis in cost accounting), I can easily see that syndication of knowledge (information in general) may impact the Global 2000 in terms of trillions of dollars in productivity. As businesses realize how much it costs to not be aware of critical business information, or when they spend lots of time finding stuff that could just as easily find their employees, the current hype over RSS will look like the warm-up session preceding a great symphonic performance.

There are many ways to calculate the ROI on RSS because [like many XML technologies] RSS can be used for hundreds, perhaps thousands of business processes.

"RSS is at the edge of a huge acceleration in adoption - The early users have been bloggers, which have clearly exploded geometrically.... The next adopters are online content publishers. Corporations are starting to use the technology. This is where it will go mainstream. The novelty factor has clearly worn off. We're now shifting into a mode where folks are looking for and extracting value from the platform." -- Brad Feld, Mobius

RSS is already making inroads into businesses.  We'll know when it's making great strides when we stop referring to it as RSS. ;-)

This is a great article by Sharon Housley and I'll pile on with a few additional comments.

One thing that's extremely important about RSS (and seems to escape the initial glance) is the notion of detecting change; the ability to know what's new about the information that the RSS feed represents. Condensing headlines is great; it allows you to quickly glance and see what's important. But to know precisely what's new at that moment, turbocharges the process, saving you time from looking at items that you may have already looked at.

Another point—higher search engine visibility is not possible by simply aggregatating RSS feeds in a Web page using Javascript. It's important to understand that search engines are not like Web browsers; they don't see what we see. As such, if your aggregation machinery is client-side (i.e., runs in the Web browser), Google will not leverage the RSS content. If adopting RSS as a measure of search optimization, consider the machinery necessary to truly benefit from this idea. MyST provides aggregation and presentation services that are server-based.

Companies like Nethawk.net take advantage of this (you'll see the streaming RSS feeds right on their home page), and it has positive affects on their visibility. Furthermore, they've chosen a unique implementation that uses our Market Syndication Services engine. They harvest interesting stories relevant to their industry segment (marketing services) and then serve up random selections of the feed to the home page. This has the affect of showing a different set of items with each request of the page; good for human visitors and great for search engines.