Comment by giantrobot

> Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.

I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles.

Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation.

RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.