Yea - I tried this same path - using Wordpress and some nice FREE plugins that do the same thing. While relatively quick to setup (the longest was finding the good feeds), it provided nothing in the way of revenue. I did get some ranking though, so I might just sell the domain names .
It is definately possible to monetize these. The problem is that the way people are using these plugins typically is counterproductive to driving a lot of traffic. By posting the same thing, at the same time, as 1 or even dozens of other sites you get penalized to death. For the average user just grabbig a lot of feeds from the internet and putting them in blogs is a waste of time. Cheers
I have yet to build a really large network for myself but as of today I could buid a $xx,xxx per month income with a months work. I say as of today because things change constantly online. Also, I am speaking of my own setup and not the one mentioned here exactly. Cheers
I'm not 100% sure on this, but some RSS feeds were not meant to be set up for sites to republish their content. They were there so their visitors could easily keep up to date of whats happening on their site through an RSS feed reader. I were going to do a news section on my site using Google news, yahoo news, bbc news, etc. But after looking at their TOS it says that the RSS feeds can be used in RSS feed agregators and can't be used for commercial gain or something like that.