RSS cuts out the middleman.

I remember sometime around 2007 I noticed people around me started using Google to visit websites they knew the URL of. Websites they visited frequently and could have been bookmarks. I thought it was incredibly lazy at the time. Google took advantage of this phenomenon to show more ads and to continue to train users on using their products. Often the user clicks on the ad purchased by the website they wanted to visit! Google has become the defacto middleman for the web.