

Ask HN: Are Paid RSS Feeds Possible? - espadagroup

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?
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JayNeely
Daring Fireball does this. See:

<http://daringfireball.net/members/info>

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bootload
_"... 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?

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jmtulloss
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.

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YuriNiyazov
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.

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

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noodle
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.

