| 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. |