Given the space in your sidebar for feeds, I imagine it does nonetheless affect your readership. My stats suggest that the RSS feeds are the most read files on my server, but I expect that bots (automatic checks by Yahoo!, Google, etc) account for a lot of that.

I prefer reading on the site itself for most blogs, however RSS feed tracking helps me know which sites have updated. If an article isn’t of interest to me, I won’t go over to the site. There are also some sites that are difficult to read, but have interesting content. RSS allows you to read the site in a simple formatting style.

In terms of opinion on advertising: I don’t go for it personally - maybe if I suddenly had stacks of traffic I might consider some discreet advertising, but I’m not in it for the money.

-Fruey