Ask HN: Are Paid RSS Feeds Possible?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417994

by espadagroup • 18 years ago

4 6 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am wondering if it is possible to offer paid rss feeds, where a user has to pay to subscribe to the feed. Not being a hacker myself, I am wondering if this is technically possible to manage? I don't think there are any services that allow for this functionality, however I just don't know if that is due to some technical aspect of stopping pirating or if just no one has found a use for the service?

jmtulloss• 18 years ago

You can use HTTP authentication for feeds, which will allow you to enforce some sort of payment scheme. However, not all readers support authenticated feeds.

noodle• 18 years ago

there are feeds and sites that work like this and provide the functionality. i've subscribed to several pay-based podcasts that have done authentication in several ways and/or through services.

JayNeely• 18 years ago

Daring Fireball does this. See:

http://daringfireball.net/members/info

bootload• 18 years ago

"... I am wondering if it is possible to offer paid rss feeds, where a user has to pay to subscribe to the feed. Not being a hacker myself, I am wondering if this is technically possible to manage? ..."

Bend the idea slightly & use the feed as (everyone else does) to disseminate (title, summary & word count restriction) & restrict the access to the document at the server. Unless of course the feed is time sensitive?

YuriNiyazov• 18 years ago

I implemented a little prototype of this. This is very doable. The beauty is that it didn't use HTTP-Auth, which meant that a user can be using Google Reader or another third-party browser, and still get access to the paid content only if they authenticated correctly, but this still happens from within the feed reader, without clicking back to the website.

gojomo• 18 years ago

I presume Google Reader only fetches a feed once for its many users. So how did you control access? (IFrames?)

Ask HN: Are Paid RSS Feeds Possible?

Related Stories