Allen Stern of Centernetworks has a provocative post in which he asks whether people would be willing to pay $1 for a full-text RSS feed, or to pay $4.95 for a bundle of 10 feeds, etc. His point (I’m pretty sure) is that advertising in RSS feeds doesn’t really work that well, and that it’s hard to monetize a blog if no one ever comes to the website and looks at the feeds. Allen has very kindly suggested that my feed could be part of the tech-blog “bundle,” but I don’t think his idea is going to work.
Many of the commenters on Allen’s blog argue that this would be good value, that full feeds without ads would be better than either partial feeds or feeds with advertising, and so on. MG Siegler at ParisLemon says that he thought the idea was ridiculous at first, but that he has warmed up to it. I’ve given it some time and thought about it a fair bit, but I’m not warming up to it at all. If anything, I’m getting colder towards the idea. I just don’t think making people pay for feeds makes any sense.
If any of the blogs that Allen has in mind were producing content that was highly valuable — inside information, valuable tips — then you might be able to argue that charging for them would make sense. But I can only think of a few blogs that fall into that category (and no, I’m not including my own), and here’s the thing: most of them are already making money from those things, just not through their blogs. As Rex Hammock said, my blog doesn’t carry advertising, my blog is advertising.
I can totally understand the desire for something like a paid-feed model — I just don’t think it would work, and it kind of goes against what I see as the whole point of having a blog. Sorry Allen.