[bgs113]

Unless a site chooses to make RSS, especially full content feeds, part of a subscriber benefit. Ars Technica, for example, provides full content feeds to subscribers, while the general public can access title + preview snippets.

Approaching it this way (similar to paid mailing lists) is the best of both worlds, providing revenue incentives to users while removing site ads for users who care about and pay for the content.

[WheelsAtLarge]

True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea. Maybe it will be possible in the future as people get used to the idea of paying for content.

[throw0101a]

> True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea.

So provide only a title+snippet feed so folks can now when you articles appear on the site, and hopefully go to the 'full' page which has ads. Anything that can drive traffic can be helpful.

[tpoacher]

I think this is too dichotomous, and misses the mark because of it.

It's not that people don't like to pay; it's that most people don't like to pay what seems like an unjustifiable amount of money for a service which is otherwise nice but not essential.

Especially when the service comes off as "defective by design", in which case rebelliousness kicks in on top of everything.

Problems compounding this effect?

1. The default is ads. This really serves to create the impression that your product isn't really worth that much, if all the user is expected to do is ignore a stupid ad on the page, which you're probably not even seeing on the first place if you have an adblocker. Which is why when the alternative monetization is $30 monthly or whatever, you're like "wat? what for?"

2. Companies rarely let you pay for what you're using. instead, it's a subscription, and it's for all the features of the site, including those 500 features you're never going to use. Hence you're asked to pay $30 a month, for an RSS feed you'd otherwise have been happy paying a far more reasonable amount.

3. Most companies don't make it easy for you to know how much you're using the product or if you're paying too much, if it hurts their "milk as much as possible" approach. If you paid cents per RSS, and had a free trial for a month to see what a typical month will cost you, I think most people wouldn't bat an eyelid when it came to paying.

[oliwarner]

Agreed. Publishers have been awful at collectively making it easy for people to throw tiny sums of money at them, for trivialities.

I would happily pay 10 cents a month for a full RSS feed to content I already had access to. I'm paying for convenience, nothing more.

I'm not paying Netflix money for content I already have access to.

[trinsic2]

I tend to agree with this. But most importantly, many sites go at this the wrong way by putting content behind a paywall. Substack and Bandcamp are good examples of ways to pay and get paid for content. If you want to people to pay for content online, incentivize.

[pvorb]

Do you know how Ars Technica does it? Is there some personalized URL to the suscriber feed? I imagine those are pretty easily shared among a group of people?

[indrora]

Per-subscriber feed.

People sharing a feed with one or two people isn't going to account for a huge amount, and one person (accidentially|on purpose) sharing their URL to a bunch of people will become visible pretty quickly in analytics. Nobody's making big dollars on illicit Ars Technica RSS Feed content, especially when a lot of the value of Ars is in their curated forums and discussions.

Ars makes enough off ads that they encourage people to pay to remove ads, get "et subscriptor" appended to their title, and some minor perks across the site (RSS, a slightly nicer forum experience, etc).

A corollary is Linux World News. LWN hides articles with journalistic leverage behind a paywall, marked as such, and offers similar per-subscriber RSS feeds. LWN doesn't have ads.

LWN also allows subscribers to share any article on their behalf; you've probably seen an LWN article or two shared by a subscriber here on HN. They know there's people who generate the share link and dump it into massive aggregators (like HN, Reddit, etc.) but they don't care because it drives people to go "maybe this is worth $20/year" and toss some cash up.

I had an LWN subscription when I was in Google Summer of Code. It was cool, and I read it far more regularly than I would have otherwise, but I decided to allow the subscription to lapse after I didn't read it daily. With my shift to a new job, I'll probably get a new LWN subscription just because it's becoming more salient to my daily work.