A discussion about payment flows for web feeds
mrchrisadams opened this issue · comments
As your own blog posts suggests, how the money thing works, to help communicate the value of feeds, is something that's important, but not traditionally well explored with RSS/Atom/webfeeds.
- Newsletters and the money thing
The “competition” for RSS is email newsletters. If RSS is going to get taken challenge email as a channel, it could use a few extra features:
- the ability to go paid – Substack offers newsletter authors a platform with built-in free and premium tiers. It offers RSS, but it’s kinda janky: the premium RSS is a private feed address that the user needs to discover and add separately. Maybe the “Upgrade to premium” button could be inside the feed reader itself, and tapping it would seamlessly upgrade the feed?
- virality and community – you can forward an email, and anybody you forward it to can subscribe from the footer. Likewise, you can reply to a newsletter and start a conversation with the author… which might even get rolled into future editions. These social features are great, and they should be built into RSS readers.
- analytics like open rates and click counting. Yeah, RSS doesn’t need this, and email is moving away from it too.
There are likely good some examples of payment flows in other services that make subscriptions work, and it might outline why they work, and which parts might work for RSS.
I've created this issue here, I can't really find much elsewhere, and this seems as good a place to discuss as any right now.