Tor's weblog

This link (in norwegian) and the following story discussed the used of RSS feeds for the online editions of major newspapers

RSS gaining ground in the newspaper world It seems the big newspapers are picking up RSS. It has been happening for a good while here in Norway. All the major newspapers have RSS-feeds of news from their online editions, and almost none of them require registration or payment to read their news.

But the problem here is traffic measurement on RSS feeds - as these are not necessarily seen by the auditing bodies as "proper page views", and can therefore not necessarily be quoted as audited pageviews by the newspapers - something they need for advertising purposes. So unfortunately not all traffic is seen as "real" traffic, and the traffic can therefore be seen as "not profitable", and therefore not necessarily a asset. One would also have to add that Norwegian newspaper have a completely different income structure to newspapers in the UK and US, as the norwegian market is mostly subscription based, with the exception of VG and Dagbladet, something that has a profound impact on how the newspaper is run, and how they look at their online editions. I would also suspect a lot of RSS traffic is generated by robots, and should therefore probably be classed alongside search-engines, and not browsers.