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Would You Pay $1 For A Feed?
Before you read this article, I’d ask that you ignore how things are today, I want you to free your mind of the current model so you can fully absorb what I am going to suggest. With that said, here we go.
What if blogs and journals offered a full feed for $1 per month with no ads, mobile access, etc. Would you subscribe for a buck? What I am proposing is the following forms of monetization: standard Web site with ads, partial feed with no ads, and a full feed with no ads for $1/month.
So many of the people I speak with daily subscribe to a ton of full feeds and never visit a site after picking up the feed. Some say that feeds strengthen the interactivity with a site because when they read the post, they are more likely to come to the site to comment. Sure, it’s easy to jam an advertisement into a feed, but what if there was another way to provide a revenue stream for a blogger to live off of and for the consumer to enjoy the media knowing they are supporting the content they enjoy?
It’s important to remember that bloggers/journalists/writers are in the game for different purposes. Some do it just to get their thoughts out, some do it to push themselves or their product/service, and some (like me) do it to make a living. In all three cases, the writers are working to get out the best possible content.
In my model, the $1 per month would allow you to take the feed with you on any device or reader you’d like. So you could read it at home on your computer, take it with you on your iPhone, mobile, etc. If you look at ReadWriteWeb, they show 159,000 subsribers. Let’s assume that 10% would buy the feed, the other 90% would move to the free partial feed. That’s would amount to a net cash flow of nearly $200,000 for the year. All because readers enjoy the content on RWW enough to send in $1 a month. Heck, there’s more cash than that in your couch right now!
Let’s take this a bit further and look at bundle offerings. I believe bundles would be where this model really shows its strength based on the pricing. A few sample bundles you could subscribe to the following "bundles" for $4.95 a month (works out to about 50 cents per sub in a bundle:
Tech bundle:
- CenterNetworks
- Mashable
- Mathew Ingram
- Marketing Pilgrim
- ParisLemon
- ReadWriteWeb
- Webware
- Jeremiah Owyang
- GigaOm
- VentureBeat
Making money bundle:
Search bundle:
- SearchEngineLand
- Search Engine Journal
- SEO Book
- Search Engine Roundtable
- SEOMoz
- TopRank Blog
- Graywolf
This idea would only work if everyone is in. If enough sites sit out and offer a free full feed (with or without ads), then this idea would never work. But if everyone is in the boat, it could work. And it could provide a better stream of revenue, one that could even replace advertising all together as a source of revenue. I am guessing most of my readers will be against this program, but I thought it is a good topic for discussion – new channels of revenue for blogs and journalists in this new economy.
As a consumer, would you buy into this program? As a publisher, would you support this type of program? If not, why? Be honest.
my first read i thought “how absurd!” then i thought more about it.
the currency on the web is access and speed. look at what diggnation does. you can pay and get their show a day or two earlier than it comes out. maybe you sign up for techcrunch DIRECT and get the news 2 or 3 hours before anyone else.
thats just off the top of my head. information should be free, but editorial information takes work, takes writers, and that costs money. you have to make it to spend it.
Ahh, the Kindle pricing for blogs back again… that one wasn’t too popular, remember?
Personally, I might think $1 is not a big deal.. or $4.50 for a bundle. But then I look at my reader and see 200+ feeds. Even after trimming it, I would probably end up paying $80-100 a month, and all of a sudden clicking through is not such a bad option… or dropping the partials entirely.
Then again, I am not very mobile, sitting at my desk makes it a no-brainer choice. Road warriors might pay for the full feed. (?)
@drew Part of techcrunch’s appeal is that they break news. If they sold it 2hrs early, others might break it sooner.
Would I pay for a quality feed? Maybe. Partial feeds are annoying but part of blogging is linking to relevant archives to engage your readers. If you do that well enough, they will come.
Brandon H
http://www.NewlyCorporate.com
Hi Allen
Without readers clicking through to create pageviews the advertising model does not work for publishers. How long will it be before Google and other feedreaders add their own related ads alongside the feed items much like Google does with Gmail? Then publishers/bloggers create the content and Google reap the reward.
Personally I would look at the Wordpress plugin that Steve Ivy and Chris Messina created to build your own social network. This turns readers/subscribers into memebers (XFN) and then you can offer added value to those members – full feed, event tickets, early beta access etc – in exchange for a minimal $1 fee per month.
This whole issue of generating fees for blogging is very much a topic today. WSJ announced more free content but no free WSJ and Scoble added adverts.
Your loyal readers will see that paying a minimal fee for your time to blog is the same as paying a shareware developer for creating a valuable application.
See here. Interesting and relevant:
http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html
The Blogosphere rehashes and recycles most of the same content. Very rarely is blog content exclusive. Also it’s already free pretty much everywhere that’s why so many people subscribe.
I would not pay $1 for any blog unless it has information that I can directly profit from.
This isn’t a horrible concept but I actually prefer Drew Olanoff’s idea. I might actually try it. If you’re a Drama Queen (paying member) you get access to posts earlier as well as access to exclusive posts. If you’re Drama Free (cheap schmuck), you have to wait.
Honestly, I find it hard to believe that anybody actually reads my blog but I do it for fun so I have nothing to lose. If I obtained 25 subscribers paying $10/month, that pays for 1/4 of my bottle service on an average Friday/Saturday night. I could live with that. Stay tuned.
PS Allen: you’re really starting to hurt my feelings. I wasn’t on the list of people you wanted to meet this year and I wasn’t included in your bundle above. Are you trying to tell me something? And what’s up with this girl you apparently introduced to my blog who now loves me?
If original content is worth 0, than no-one will produce it besides the hobbiests – who will eventually stop producing too. It takes time to produce content, and time is money. Someone could be writing an article on RSS technology and get nothing for all his research and time writing it, or do something else which pays. The quality of content will go down the toilet, and pretty soon you will start paying for good content.
At the end of the day no one will produce anything, if they are not getting something worth in return. The world were content is free and ad-free is a utopian world, when the society reaches a point where there is no need for money or valuables – than you will have free original content.
I was advised by your "security detail" that if I added you to the list of people I’d like to meet this year, that I’d be terminated. Henceforth, I left you off – only because I still have work to do here.
I am not sold that exclusive content (unless its great research reports) or getting the content early would work. But I do think we are moving into a good direction.
All I am asking for is a buck. Four quarters. Ten dimes.
I can get you ten dimes (definition for the uninitiated). I can also get you ten dime sacks. The two typically go great together, actually.
Just to reiterate what was said in the comments above, I too would certainly be up for the bundles proposal as long as you could in fact use these feeds across the board and not just on say, an Amazon Kindle.
I’d certainly pay for that outstanding Tech bundle :)
For you, I’d come meet you each month and let you give me the 10 dimes in person.
I think the bundles would rock and yes, they would be available anywhere.
Get to Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil and I’ll take care of the rest.
Allen,
What you’re really getting at is RSS feeds are difficult to monetize, which is why people who try to make money from blogging probably suffer as much as they gain when people subscribe to their RSS feed as opposed to visiting their Web site. The problem is the RSS cat is already out of the bag so asking someone to pay for something that is convenient and free would be difficult.
Personally, I would probably pay for a small handful of feeds if push came to shove. Seth Godin, TechCrunch and Zen Habits immediately come to mind. That said, most feeds that I currently have in my RSS reader wouldn’t make the pay cut.
Mark
If you don’t import into it FB, I’m gonna!
There are a few issues here. A number of issues make this more complicated than it seems
Anyway. I posted my comments on my blog post: Would you pay $1 for an RSS Feed?
there are a half a dozen blogs i would pay a buck a month for… none of them product oriented, or tech or startup news, nor gossip, but thinkers, guys who improve my ideas
pretty rare anywhere
I might take it.
To take your idea further, there should be a company that provides full feeds to hundreds of blogs that sign up, each taking a fair share of revenue based on how many people it has reading its full feed. This way, for the user, they’re paying $5 a month for every blog associated. This could be hundreds, and thousands, and publishers are getting their fair share of revenue.
This idea is very intriguing to me. On the one hand it would help out those (like me) who are in definite need of money, on the other hand, you’ll never get everyone to come on board with it. As soon asy a big name blog starts charging for their feed, a little guy somewhere, offering the same content, will have a free feed that will be followed by everyone who won’t pay the $1. The little guy will then become a big guy. Essentially, like the post said, everybody would have to be on board, which is never going to happen.
it has some additional value that will help me get some of my reading time back. Let’s take for example the search bundle, I will pay for a full feed of blog posts in sites like Sphinn with the additional feature to select the feed depending on the number of votes (feed for stories with more than x number of votes).
Blog posts are usually a one man/view show and the real added value are comments – that’s why I prefer to visit Techcrunch – and this is the focus to take advantage with the creation of own social networks around blogs; for feeds it is not enough only bundling.
As a publisher, I like the bundling approach…
This idea outraged me, but it’s so clearly impracticable that I calmed right down. People don’t want to pay for music, movies, or software, and they certainly aren’t going to pay for blogs. Also, good luck organizing it.
I have over 150 feeds right now, painstakingly selected, and trying to pick which ones to keep would tear my heart out. This idea would pretty much destroy RSS, and maybe the internet as we know it. Web pages would start offering samples of their content, full text available only with a paid subscription to the feed. It’s dangerous, self-centered meddling, and all your favorable comments are from other bloggers.
Okay, that’s a little harsh, and I have heard and been intrigued by variations on this idea before. Better incentive to produce quality material and so on. I just think it would turn the whole thing into a chore. “Oh, is it the thirteenth already? Have to pay my RSS bill.”
In any case, for me at least, I open the majority of pages that appear interesting in new tabs. I will open five or six of them before going to check them out, then be pleasantly surprised when I get to the last tabs, because I have forgotten what they are about.
There’s two elements at work here: the feed and the fee.
The reason RSS is so good is because it is simple and standard. There’s no barriers to adoption, it works everywhere. Adding different grades of feeds — eg premium vs basic — will absolutely hinder adoption and suppress innovation.
As for paying for a “feed-like” service, yes, I would; the same way I pay for content now. I buy newspapers, magazines and subscribe to Salon.com. Soon, I’ll be able to experience all three of these on one digital device (not the Kindle, something more evolved).
At which point we will need a (micro-)payment mechanism. Keep feeds free: it is the circulatory system of information dissemination. Let’s develop another pipe for premium content.
This type of Idea has just been released for video anyway.
http://www.openTVnetwork.com
James
Thanks Kevin – just read your post and will reply (as soon as I remember my wp pwd) — I think the key is to not worry about the technology. First let’s figure out what we want, then make the technology work to it.
Look at apple with the macbook air – they didn’t say "we’ll there’s only a x size processor, we must use it" :)
I would pay for content I value. 99c but not a penny more :). A subscription model would break the heart of RSS though. What if a third-party, not-for-profit blogger association was set-up with the sole purpose of monetizing reader loyalty? Bloggers would register with this association and tell their readers about it via a simple “Like this post?”. Readers who were of the mindset that good content should be rewarded would click that link, go to the association account for that blogger and click a “25c Once” button or a “99c Month” and be done with it. Firsttime users would have to hook a PayPal account or something (but it beats signing up for each and every blogger). This way RSS stays free and unfetered. Bloggers themselves are a community so they could encourage each other to join this association as a practical way to get rewarded without breaking RSS. The co-op approach also reduces the risk of “first-movers” left hanging out there.
Through the use of browser plug-ins and “no scripting”, I don’t see Advertisements at all. Not here, not in my feeds (Ads are blocked in Google Reader with the proper plug-ins), not on any sites unless I choose to. More and more people are blocking Ads in feeds and at sites. Having people pay for “feeds” is just going to piss them off (See Music Industry circa 1991).
The days of paid content are drawing to a close. The days of Ad supported content will also begin to wind down.
I realize the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is NOT throwing open their doors and keeping their subscriber side content locked up (along with their feeds). There will always be hold outs to the bitter end. Much of the paid content on WSJ is copied, grammar fixed, and offered for free else were. Even if you try to sell feeds, someone will turn it on you out of spite or for philosophical reason.
Many on the Net of spoken and feel that original content — writing, music or movies — is worth nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Attempts to charge for content will only be met with the formation of more black markets and popular subversion.
Bundling seems silly to me. Sounds like the cable company. I watch a total of about a dozen channels, but I have to pay for 70 of them. Dumb. If you let me create my own ‘10 feed bundles’ from a pool of blogs, maybe, *maybe* that might be okay.
You say ‘don’t sweat the tech details’ but I think you’re wrong to ignore that issue. One of the reasons RSS has succeeded is exactly that the tech is easy. Easy for publishers, easy for readers – and what you’re proposing is not easy. Plus, a lot of devices like phones &tc. simply don’t handle password-protected feeds very well. You’ve got some serious technical hurdles in this idea and I think you do your readers a disservice by trying to brush them under the rug. They are an integral part of whether a monetization scheme like this works or not.
I’ve already got too many small, recurring charges on my credit cards, some of which I don’t even remember what they’re for any more.
What you MIGHT do is offer a free feed with the subject and just the first few lines, so subscribers will know there’s an update they might care about and then click on through to the blog. Then, for the die-hard fans, offer a full feed for a ONE-TIME tiny fee ($5, maybe?). Give ‘em a URL with a unique identifier so you can maybe see when one of these paid feeds has gotten loose in the wild, and if it has, notify the owner, change the indentifier and disallow the original URL.
But then again, are the costs of the additional ongoing subscription-feed maintenance greater than the amount of revenue they might generate? (Shrugs).
By the way, I got here by way of a free feed at somebody else’s techblog. :-)
no way.
a song is pretty unique, but I tend to see the same info posted on many blogs. Charging for feeds is so anti why RSS came to be.
I also find full stories annoying, as I prob click through less than 5%, and enjoy scanning headlines.
Would never pay you $1. If you start charging, one person will pay you and then repost your info on their site which I can to sub to for free.
I would definitively not be willing to pay for a service that is currently free and here is why:
- Even if I subscribe to a feed, only a small percentage of these articles are of interest to me. And I think this is what makes the feeds great. In a very efficient way, you can browse through topics that generally are of interest and as stated above, if you come across a great article, you go to the website for the comments anyways (if you do not already subscribe to them)
- If we have to pay for feeds without advertisements now, guess what happens in two years: you have to pay for feeds WITH advertisements. It is like with TV and most other things: in the beginning, when it is new, everything is for free. Then premium services come out that cost money. Alternatively, some companies try different revenue models and offer free, ad-supported content and in the end you have to pay and watch the ads (… and this is why I hate TV btw.)
In my opinion, this is very consumer unfriendly (but unfortunately most of the time turns out to work this way). Hey, and you do not need 200′000 dollars per year ;-)
Not just no but HELL NO !!
Capitalism is always trying to find a way to get into the ppls back pocket.
[...] is one way to skin a cat, does “paid” have an online future? For example, how about charging RSS subscribers, who enjoy instant delivery of trusted content to their “doorstep” without having to go [...]
[...] it be?? Is Ars the first major tech site to charge for full RSS feeds? Could my post about RSS for $1 finally be gaining some forward momentum? What does Dave Winer think about [...]
Allen, Paying for full text RSS feeds is an interesting concept. Personally, I would pay because, in my opinion, partial text RSS feeds provide little value because you still have to “shell out” to multiple sites to get the full content.
To your model, I’d suggest one additional option: For the full text RSS feed, the user might have the option to either pay $1, or get the full text RSS feed for free with ads in the feed. Users who don’t want to pay and don’t want ads would be relegated to using the partial text RSS feed.
John
Co-Founder
PimpMyNews.com
Here is why.
iTunes. There are thousands of podcasts. All free. If iTunes would start offering the ability to offer not only free podcasts, but also, for pay podcasts, just like their music, then I think it might work, but until iTunes does this, the #1 podcast directory in the planet, no one is going to really be able to charge for their shows.
Believe me, I want to do that. I have 3 pretty popular podcast (check out http://www.TheDigitalMediaDude.com), on iTunes Top 100, and I put out a feeler about people paying and not one bite.
Sponsorships are a different thing. Companies are willing to sponsor my podcast because my audience is their key demographics. But charging the customer directly, no one (for now at least) wants to pay because everything is free in iTunes.
I think, for now, the best way to monetize your podcast is through sponsorships. But that’s hard too. You have to do a lot (and daily) of business development to get them and you have to show stats to them.
I think the future of podcasting is the same as radio / tv. Free model, with lots of advertising / sponsorships. Unless, we come up with a “cable tv” or satellite tv like model where a companies start carrying a bunch of channels and charge a monthly fee for packages (kind of like your article states…but more enhanced) and then people sign up for these packages, but then, there goes the entire point of having everyone podcast, now only the “few lucky ones” that get picked up by a network or company get to be heard. And be careful if you are wishing for that, because your podcast may be the one not picked up.
It’s not as easy as one may think. I’m sure it will be worked out, but while you have iTunes, YouTube and the gazillion of websites that offer free podcasts / videos, very few people will pay for now.
Cheers!
- Marcelo
The Digital Media Dude
http://www.TheDigitalMediaDude.com/
Maybe a service that provides a turnkey solution for blogging and file hosting costs (for audio and video blogs), but then does profit sharing with content creators, each taking a fair share of revenue based on how many people it has reading its full feed, for instance, or associated targeted add click-throughs, or whatever.
Whether you can get away with charging the user is another story- doubt if I would pay for a feed to a text blog unless it had timely competitive info and I could then, for instance, consider it a business expense; I think someone could make a killing here if they made deals with truly high value added content creators, and of course physically collected, controlled, and distributed the feeds.
Audio and video (entertainment) feeds are a whole different story though- I already subscribe to a few (yearly fee) for the convenience factor (pods) and so I don’t have to listen to/watch commercials.
With all that said, though, if I could find a way to monetize my feeds (audio and video) though, I’d interested- if for no other reason than to cover costs (cause I just like creating the audio/video anyhow).
James, just because someone could steal the content instead of paying doesn’t mean you shouldn’t charge.
Should the twinkies be free at the 7-11 you work at just because someone has the ability to shoplift?
Give me a break.
And sorry, a “for profit” business model that relies on donations is not a realistic business.
Allen,
I produce the Mr. Media blog/podcast site. I would certainly make it available for a for-pay feed program or bundle. There is no model currently compelling me to rule anything else out – I did join the Kindle program – and it’s way too early in the history of this stuff to rule ANYTHING out.
Interesting idea – count me in.
Bob Andelman
Mr. Media
Why require $1 per feed? Why not allow the users to pay what they think it is worth? Many people wouldn’t pay because they can get away with it. But, in fact, they are not, because the blog owner will put up ads to generate revenue, making the site slower and more cluttered. With poorfrog.com, a site owner can estimate how much it is worth to the users to implement certain features (like the elimination of ads). If users are willing to pay enough, the owner can remove the ads from the site.
My company, poorfrog.com, is developing a service that helps users interact with and support blog owners (and websites in general). Users can suggest improvements and give micro-donations to those sites for their services.
Web sites can, in turn, see how much money is being donated to them for the services that they are providing. They can use this information to make a decision whether or not to implement new features.
-Tom
I would also pay for opinion/art/ideas/music sites that I found t be credible over a trial period for free.
If I feel a loss when access is denied me a particular site that I like to read regularly—only then will my wallet be tapped.
Great subject matter! Thanks for the brainstorm. Your pint about everyone being on board for it to work is not necessarily the case. There are an awful lot of sites out there that would have to pay me to read them.
I have a question for all that support this…
How would a site ensure that the feeds are not being shared amongst friends? Would they watermark them? Would they have ways of tracking how/what you read? Let us give up more privacy, brilliant.
How would search engines be able to navigate content that is restricted? Would you go to a site and be rejected the ability to have a content feed?
I could easily program an application that will snatch content from a site automatically. RSS/Atom feeds just take out the work for me. It would not work anytime soon.
It would be almost impossible for someone to manage something like this. It would stop the basic users, but clever hackers like myself could find ways around it.
If you love a site so much, send them a donation!!! Do you really want advertising networks to be taking 50% of feed revenue as well now?
You would be doing everyone a favor by sending that site/blog you read right now a one dollar donation. That is my challenge to everyone who said yes to this.
Isn’t it ironic that bloggers (and I don’t mean Allen specifically), who have been championing the call for free music now want readers to pay for feeds.
I have been saying for a while now that while it is easy to call for free music, accepting free music as the norm would set a dangerous precedent for all digital content. The mere fact that content can be easily copied and shared does not make it right to do so. The people who create this content deserve to be compensated for their efforts. This is true for bloggers, artists, authors and all other creative types.
I’d pay 50 cents depending on the. I subscribed to about 50 feeds. I’m NOT going to pay $50 per month for them. I’d be willing to pay $25 per month.
However, not all feeds are worth 50 cents. Some are just worth 10 cents.
I currently subscribe to over 300 feeds. There’s no way I would pay that a month. The problem is that there are probably 50 or so core feeds that I would be willing to pay for, but even at that rate, I’d probably go without.
Your proposal sounds like paying for porn, when you can find asian twins, wearing red dotted panties, kissing, for free. So why pay?
The posts from the ‘hubs’ you mentioned get repeated in social aggregators, other blogs and everywhere else you can imagine. Would that be forbidden in your monetization idea? Would blog content be strictly copyrighted?
I would just stop reading these blogs. Not only I find it immoral to find a marketing plan for everything, but I also find many (and constantly increasing) not-so-popular blogs really interesting – so I would just stay with them.
You would say that these Problogs are setting the course of the social web and if I wouldn’t subscribe, I would probably stay out of the current news (I would get them a week later, or something like that).
Well if the social web would take such a course, then I wouldn’t want to be a part of it.
Sorry for the extensive comment, but I believe some things should stay free (with or without ads).
i think it’s a pretty intersting subscription model that’s well worth thinking about. though: ads in feeds are not making me pay for a feed without ads. ads are part of the (web) game and they don’t bug me enough to try to get rid of it.
I could see another incentive being exklusive feed content or maybe even “published in feed before published online” content etc.
I agree with Steve. There needs to be more value-add than ad-free (I just ignore the ads), and differentiation from all the other feeds in the space. Like business to business newsletters, you have to sell the readers on the benefits of subscribing, hitting on what keeps us up at night, and how you’ll help us solve our problems. That’s why good industry newsletters cost hundreds or thousands, even. It totally makes sense to look at insider industry blogs and feeds this way.
I am not suggesting we have ad-free option — I am suggesting it’s pay or partial. No ads either way.
But at the same time, while I agree with you JS – don’t you believe in supporting the person(s) who provide you with the content that helps make you smarter?
When was the last time you expected a book to be free?
I would certainly pay $1 for a quality feed. Media outlets pay for their wire access, and a hell of a lot more than a dollar a month. Even better, $1 is nothing in the UK right now – even better deal for me :-)
I made a personal change to my RSS habits recently. I now click through to the articles that interest me – never reading in my actual feed reader (I switch between NetNewsWire and Newslife on my mac). This is mainly a moral decision, so I can see ads on the blog just in case one appeals.
My main worry about quality blogs are them disappearing because of lacking of finance, not that I might have to shell out a measly $1 to read it’s RSS.
Paying for a feed is an interesting idea and it could work for some feeds/contents. Personally I am not sure I would pay $1 a month for any of the feeds I subscribe to today. Today for less than $1 a month I can subscribe (and do subscribe) to a lot of different print magazines with much better content.
Another problem with the idea is the RSS technology does not support athentication – is just a url i can access from anywhere in the web. There is no subscriber ids, address, verification, etc. This makes it even harder to bring your idea to reality – unless you impose your users to use spefic RSS readers that do have support for authentication.
I would consider paying for a bundle, if there was enough added value beyond just ad-free, and if last100.com was included in the tech category ;-)
It’s an interesting concept, and I’ve long wondered about better monetization of feeds (we offer a full rss feed) since a lot of people never ever click through.
At last100 we run some ads in our feed, but alas, advertisers don’t treat feeds the same as page views, so the revenue they generate hardly registers.
Your point about the different reasons / models of blogging is important. Not all bloggers (in fact very few) are trying to make a living through their writing. If you are — and try to blog full time or employ a team of writers — these issues matter. If not, they don’t.
- Steve, editor and co-founder last100.com
Thanks for stopping by Steve – someone has to throw themselves in front of the train, I will be that person – but I think it’s time for a new feed model.
You pay Britey 99c for a song, why not 99c for a feed?
For information to be valueable it needs to be unique and actionable to the reader – otherwise it’s basically entertainment and there’s no shortage of that. In judging the value of online content one must think in terms of expiration date. Most online content has a spoilage factor less than a carton of milk.
I think that as long as there is reasonable quality, free content available on the web, the majority will default to the free content, regardless of whether it’s a step down in quality.
I think Nicholas Carr said it best when he said: “… free trumps quality all the time.”
Read that post here: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
Thanks for stopping by Aidan – I completely agree that someone will almost always choose the free option. What about if we have built a relationship btw writer and reader – does that change your opinion of paying the $1/mo?
I can certainly understand why well-established sites with a high level of readership would want to find more ways to monetize themselves. Obviously, this would work best for the A-list or maybe B-list blogs of today — although conversely, the fact that they were free might allow some of the more unknown bloggers today to raise their profile.
I’m also unclear on the technical requirements that would allow those sites to publish a full RSS feed that only subscribers could access — would a purpose-built feed reader be required? Would you have to do some sort of login each time you tried to retrieve the feed?
first we agree on the idea – then we figure out the tech to solve it. im sure it’s easier to do than you might imagine.
Whenever you post an idea like this, the majority of the comments will be those who don’t want to pay.
Ignore them.
The folks who would pay for the convenience of a full feed are not likely to chime in and say, “yes please do charge me,” but are more than willing to spend a buck a month because they consider it an investment in ideas. Pick up one or two great ideas per month and even $20 a month is a bargain.
Unsuccessful people consider the $1 as an expense – successful people consider it a tiny investment.
In a very real sense, this would also help me as a consumer, to carefully choose which feeds I subscribe to. Information overload is already an issue and this would have the side-effect of helping me cope with that by paring down the number of feeds.
And finally, if a blogger is concerned they would lose subscribers, do you really want a subscriber that doesn’t consider your content worth a single dollar? That type of person isn’t likely to buy anything your sponsors are offering anyway, so their value to you is zero. Be happy they have decided to unsubscribe.
“When was the last time you expected a book to be free?”
When I checked it out from the library.
“I would not pay $1 for any blog unless it has information that I can directly profit from.”
Maybe some folks will pay you based on the PBS model of being “sponsors”. You can try that. As for books, I pay for them because I expect to either get enlightened or entertained. I don’t pay for them to support the authors (or their agents, publishers, printers, etc). BTW, check out Chris Anderson’s discussion “The emerging world of free”, based on his upcoming book (and article in WIRED): http://tinyurl.com/2547xr
Why try to introduce friction into the system? Should the NYTimes start charging for online access again?
Do ads in RSS feeds really bother you? I don’t even notice them, and it seems like many others don’t, either.
We’re trying to get to a point where ads aren’t ads (with the negative connotation the word has today). While our ad networks and targeting are still so primitive and CPA monetization so inefficient that publishers can make more serving CPM banners than they can with revenue-sharing deals, this won’t always be the case. CPA advertising aligns the interests of all three parties – advertiser, publisher, and consumer – much more closely + correctly than CPM models do. We’ll get to the point, eventually, where you want to see ads because they consistently offer goods and services that you are inclined to partake in.
I don’t think you want the average man’s answer to this. ;)
Just don’t comment :)
Firstly, why not make it optional pay (for additional services). Let’s say there is a service, that allows you to charge for your full feed content, would you as an author, decide to publish your feed through that service?
The service, could provide a RSS reader, that charges your card, when you ding on a post. Let’s provide a button that charges $0.01 when the reader decides that your article is worth $0.01 of his money?
howz that?! If the author impresses the reader he gets $0.01
I’d pay a buck a month to get Scott Adam’s Dilbert blog in a full feed, yes…. but that’s because his writing is pretty unique.
To get tech commentary? Not so much. There’s too much of it out there… and frankly, it is in a company’s best interest to get as much coverage of itself as possible, so no tech review/news feed will ever be unique/replaceable to me.
The idea is fine, but the pricing is off. Remember that I can get a “real” magazine, with multiple professional writers doing both investigatory journalism and breaking news, printed and shipped to my door for less than $1/mo — although their frequency is less.