[John Robb's Radio Weblog] From the perspective of the site you are scraping, they get a page view every hour.  In fact, they make more money if you scrape than if you don't (most people don't visit the home page of most news sites 24 times a day).  So, in the near term, they are making more money from the small percentage of the audience that scrapes vs. visits.  Longer term, it makes sense that they offer an RSS feed themselves.  It increases the chances of subscribers clicking on the link to the full story.

It probably also depends on the kind of site you are scraping and the use you do of the rss feed.

If, for example, you are scraping the index of a news site such a newspaper, since all links are pointing to their own stories you are probably creating more traffic for them from clicktroughs.

If you are scraping a weblog-style site (i.e. scripting.com or macintouch.com), since most of the link are pointing to other sites you are taking traffic away from the site.

Then, once you set up the feed you can easily share it with other users on your intranet or also with the rest of the world (I could subscribe to the Boston.com feed that you are generating), thus taking more traffic away from these sites.

If there are still sites out there generating revenues with impressions and click trough, they might not like users scraping their sites.

What they could do to solve the problem from their POV would be generate the feeds themselves, and include banners in the feeds.