Pay-for-RSS?
October 26th, 2006 Brian Herzog
While at NELA last weekend, I attended a session by Linda Braun, who talked a lot about RSS feeds. One of the tools she presented was PageFlakes, which I had never seen before. During her talk, she kind of offhandedly commented that one of the reasons she likes PageFlakes is that it lets her save stories she wants to read, but doesn’t have time to save at the moment. That way, the text of the article gets stored on the PageFlakes server, and, obviously, she can go back and read them later.
She then commented that this is sort of a loophole to subscription news services, like the New York Times. The NYT provides free access to their stories for 14 days, but stories older than that require a subscription fee to read. However, by saving the stories on PageFlakes, she creates her own archive, and never has to pay to read older stories she had saved before they were 14 days old.
I found this interesting for two reasons: first, I like loopholes. Second, though, it made me wonder about RSS feeds, which I think most people take for granted right now (if they know about them at all). But what if RSS feeds go the way of bank ATMs - something that started out as being a free service provided by pretty much all the major players, and then, after people incorporated them into their lives and essentially became dependant on them, were suddenly no longer free (at least, to use another bank’s ATM).
So right now I can get NYT articles for free through RSS, but I don’t see it as unfathomable that they would see this as a viable way to make money in the future - after all, people pay for convenience, and RSS feeds are much more convenient than visiting their website every day.
