Offering RSS Feeds: Does It Help to Gain Competitive Advantage?

Nowadays, many websites have adopted the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology to deliver online content to visitors. In this paper, I build an analytical model to examine how the offering of RSS feeds impact the number of visitors, total traffic load, and profit of websites in a competitive setting. I show that although RSS can always attract more visitors, it may reduce the website's profit. Interestingly, in a competitive market there are cases that the RSS feeds hurt the offering website but benefit the competing website instead. The conditions under which these will happen are derived. I also study the simultaneous RSS-adoption game and show that different equilibrium outcomes will appear under different parameter combinations. Applying my findings to the practice, I suggest that offering RSS feeds could become a competitive disadvantage, and that certain types of websites, such as websites providing free content, should not offer RSS feeds.