SilliconValleyWatcher comments on a The NY Times press release claiming a 342% annual increase in RSS click-throughs on their site..

"It's interesting to look at how the RSS click-throughs for March 2005 compares to the total traffic for that month. The Times reported 5.9 million pageviews from RSS and there were a total of 555 million pageviews for the whole website. So that equates to a little over 1% of the whole site's traffic. A drop in the ocean, in terms of bare figures.

But when you consider that traffic for the whole website only grew by 17% over the past year, whereas the RSS click-throughs grew by 342% in that same period... well you begin to see how RSS is going to be a key driver in growth for the NY Times. Strategically, that's how the NY Times will view this."

Here's a thought.  Assuming continued gowth of 332% for RSS click-throughs, the RSS-driven pageviews on the site would grow from 5.9m in the last year, to 19.6m in the next, 67m in the next and 229m within three years, roughly representing 27% of the total PVs.  I'm sad, and I did the math:

 (numbers in millions) Yearly growth %   Year -1   Year 1   Year 2   Year 3
RSS Driven PVs 342.0 5.9 19.6 67.0 229.1
Total PVs 17.0 555.0 649.4 743.7 838.1
RRS Driven PVs as % of total PVs - 1.1 3.0 9.0 27.3