What if online newspapers would offer full RSS feeds and charge for it?
Over at netzwertig.com I yesterday in a post suggested that leading media publishers could start to offer full RSS feeds and in return charge users for access. Unlike most blogs, online newspapers usually only publish the first few sentences of an article, making it necessary to open them in a new browser window if you want to read the whole piece.
Even though it is understandable why publishers are doing this - they need the ad impressions, and ads in RSS feeds do not seem to be very popular - teaser feeds interrupt the smooth information flow when scanning through my Google Reader items (By the way: RSS is far from being dead, even if others think so), especially when using a mobile device.
So I suggested a solution where online newspapers could offer not only a free teaser feed, but also a paid full feed with additional customization options, for let's say 2 or 3 Euro per month. It's nothing that will suddenly save the online journalism and heal all its problems, but it would be a step into the right direction: Giving additional value to people who are willing to pay for convenience, without putting up pay walls for everyone.
From a technical standpoint a paid RSS feed could lead to some challenges, since the unique feed URL that a user gets could theoretically be shared with others. Still, it would be worth a try. And who knows, maybe publishers could even work together with Google to offer some kind of authorisation within Google Reader. Maybe Google Reader could become something like the iTunes for online publications. I mean, even if publishers have developed some kind of dislike of Google, I am sure they would happily cooperate with the internet giant if they could earn some extra bucks.
From my personal user perspective, the situation looks like this: I want to have access to the full feeds of my very few favourite online newspapers (e.g. German Spiegel Online, Swedish Dagens Nyheter). I would be willing to pay for it, 2 or 3 Euro per month (or even more, if it is a really attractive offer, with a lot of personalization features). Now, will there be an option for this in the future or not?
