Weaselboy
Occasional Visitor
I think it is a tradeoff. For my news reading setup, if there is no RSS feed, the site is pretty much off the grid for me and I will never visit or read any articles there at all. Versus following the feed and seeing an interesting article that draws me to the web site.Recommend not doing this, as my RSS feed-reader uses their own ads, and I'm sure others do as well - and this will hurt page views here...
I don't have any official studies to back this up, but my sense would be that sites see an uptick in traffic when an RSS feed is added, not the reverse.