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RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why

RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked. I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification. 1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification. If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable first-party alternative to ads. Challenges here would be: - Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle payments?) - Verifying proof of payment extremely fast Someone(s) should create a new protocol. FTP was invented in 1971. SMTP was invented in 1982. HTTP was invented in 1989. RSS was invented in 1999. Bitcoin was invented in 2008. The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.

xtracto 6y ago
So maybe a combination of RSS and Brave?
zelly 6y ago
Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. What is happening is that the only publishers that will exist shall be only those who create it for free. There is simply a glut of content out there because the barrier to creating content is completely gone.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Free, loss leader, or honeypot. Most places use content to get you to look at ads, but some places write content as a sort of ad itself - we said something thoughtful to build brand recognition, consumer confidence.
  - methou 6y ago
    Ja, I've seen enough of these sites, the content is awful but filled the first pages in my Google search. I used to call them malicious SEO sites, but your point makes better sense than my hatred.
- KajMagnus 6y ago
  > Micropayments have been tried. They all failed Would be interesting to read about that — you happen to have any links? I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: "One type of micropayment that does work — one you might not even think of as a micropayment — is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP are a huge source of revenue [...]" And: "One reason users don’t like micropayments for content [to read] is it requires a decision ... waste the users’ mental effort ... costs so little that its implied worth is almost nothing" (here: https://blog.applovin.com/why-micropayments-fail-and-one-notable-success-story/ https://blog.applovin.com/why-micropayments-fail-and-one-not... )
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - zelly 6y ago
    Sure, just look around, do you see any successful micropayments processing companies? Do you use any of them? If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question. There was a wave of micropayments startups about 6 years ago. The only one I remember is Flattr. The crypto bubble came and gave new hope because maybe the reason micropayments failed before was the credit card processing fees. Nope, still didn't work. I don't use Brave Rewards and have never heard of anyone making more than pennies with it. Xanadu was one of the original visions of the internet from the 1960s. It sounded like a lot of the idealistic plans people come up with for micropayments where content creators can collect micropayments from viewers. Of course it didn't work. Micropayments is an absolute cemetery of a business model.
    - KajMagnus 6y ago
      Thanks for the reply, didn't know about Xanadu. Didn't come to think about Flattr. > If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question If you change from to: "successful" to "hugely successful in all English speaking countries" then I agree ... almost, But there're also different continents and countries and different languages ... Which prompted me to now search for "Chinese micropayments" — and: > "[the company's] growing profit margins are riding the wave of China's exploding media micropayment economy" https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-music-uses-tipping-to-rack-up-revenues-why-arent-western-music-streaming-platforms-doing-the-same/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-music-uses-ti... Reading a bit more on different sites: Apparently this started 5 years ago and has been working well, in China. Micropayments. A little bit I got the impression it's currently being used primarily for tipping.
- Dotnaught 6y ago
  >The fair market price for content is $0. That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, and so on. The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the Googles and Facebooks of the world: When all content is equal, no content creator has any negotiating power. But there's a distinction between a multi-month investigative report and hastily paraphrased rewrite at some fly-by-night website intent on capturing algorithmic ad dollars. Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed. It's worth asking how much we will pay for reports on political corruption, civic injustice, and so on. If the price for content is $0, the signal to noise ratio will disappear.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I think journalism is going to have to clean up its act a lot before I'm willing to trust it enough to pay for it. I'm seeing more credible journalism done by bloggers than the mainstream media at the moment.
  - zelly 6y ago
    I meant "content" as in cultural content--articles, Q&A submissions, blog posts, takes, memes, recipes, how-tos, tutorials. Content that makes up >80% of G search results. At one time, there was a price for such content because you could only get it from a print publication or from broadcast television. Now that there are no barriers to posting, we see how many people actually want to publish content even if they have to pay out of pocket to host it (i.e., making the price of their content negative since the consumer gets to freeload bandwidth without ads and consume content). > Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed. You're suggesting that journalism is a public good because the value is captured by society as a whole as opposed to by the individual newspaper subscriber. I wouldn't argue against investigative journalism being important for democracy etc., but why does it need to cost anything (even by the public)? What about the whole Harvey Weinstein/MeToo saga which started after some individuals made some tweets without being paid by a journalism company to do so. There is no shortage of outraged citizen activists who will do "investigative journalism". I don't know why their free work should automatically be considered inferior just because they don't have a journalism degree and aren't being paid by a journalism company.
- ericflo 6y ago
  What about games? People pay tons of money for them, and they are content too. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out later this year, try telling people it's worth $0. I think the difference is social norms. The internet having no real built-in payment mechanism has obliterated the norm of paying for most content. Games have held the line, but things like Google Stadia and Apple Arcade are working to change that.
  - zelly 6y ago
    A game is intellectual property like a movie. If I copy and paste 1/5th of your game, you can sue me and win. If I copy and paste 1/5th of your blog post, as long as I put quote marks around it, I'm safe. Games won't become free until it's easy for commoners to make them. Even with Unity and all the easy plug and chug game dev resources, it's still hard and requires multiple people with different talents.
    - schmudde 6y ago
      It's social norms and perceived value (which are interrelated). From sampling music to quoting literature - there is case precedent and fair use. Software is no different. When Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, the standards were incredibly high. If I violate a GPL license or steal some copywritten Unity code for my game - I'm probably pretty safe. Unless, of course, a bunch of people agree that my software is valuable. I could be in big trouble if that's the case, even if I give it away for free (as in beer) and never make a cent off it.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  > Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. To be fair, most were aweful and never reached critical mass. And many were to early and badly placed. Today situation is different. Patreon, twitch, youtube, netflix, spotify and all the other paid services proof that people are willing to pay something for content, to their conditions. I think a well implemented micro-payment could work out today well enough to be viable. Something build into the browsers and aggregator-sites (reddit, hackernews, google news, facebook...) first. Most users don't wanna waste their time with micromanaging their bills, so make it optional, and automate it for the rest of the time.
- rb808 6y ago
  >The fair market price for content is $0. I would have agree with this two years ago but things have changed. I'm just worn down with the huge volume of free dross that doesn't tell you anything. This year I've started subscribing to a bunch of resources and stopped with google news/fb noise.
- zrail 6y ago
  The legions of small publishers making a living on substack beg to differ.
  - nl 6y ago
    1) Subscription is not the same thing as micropayments (as they are commonly understood) 2) It's pretty unclear to me that Substack actually lets "legions" of writers make a living. https://substack.com/discover https://substack.com/discover lists the top (income making?) writers, and it drops off very quickly. By number 25, it is "hundreds of subscribers" paying $10/month. That's a nice hobby income but isn't really "a living".
worble 6y ago
> This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked. Is this that bad? I personally don't mind this at all, I subscribe to RSS feeds so I can easily tell at a glance who has an update in one place. If they then want to redirect me for the full content, then so be it, especially if the alternative is me loading every single one of those sites every day to check anyway.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I do mind such RSS feeds that just try to force people to load the webpage. With the vast majority of my RSS feeds, I never have to leave Emacs’ Elfeed RSS reader to consume daily news. If a feed won't let me see the full content in RSS, then I am more likely to delete the feed than become a pair of eyeballs for the website’s advertisers.
  - k1m 6y ago
    I work on a project to convert partial feeds into full-text versions. It pulls in the article content from each feed item and then creates a new full-text feed. Feel free to try it out here: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/ http://ftr.fivefilters.org/
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - lordgrenville 6y ago
      If somebody chooses to make their (complete) writing available only on their site, I can choose not to read it (and often do!) But I don't think it's right to pull it from their site and repackage it.
- HunOL 6y ago
  Absolutely agree. I just can't get why in every discussion about RSS somebody mentions that y it's dead because publishers had to give away content for free. Feed could contain full article, but don't have to.
bastawhiz 6y ago
> This is why Google killed it. Is this true? It certainly doesn't feel like it. Reader was a first party branded reader. Google could put ads on Reader relevant to your interests (which they'd have been more keenly aware of than if you weren't using Reader), and they didn't have to pay out the publishers. Google killed Reader, I think, for the second reason you mentioned: publishers were neutering their feeds. Reader had gone from a tool for consuming content to a tool for being notified about content.
- DevX101 6y ago
  Google would have been rightfully sued to hell and back if they started putting ads in the reader client with no compensation back to the publishers.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    Why? Many RSS readers have ads, and the publisher is making their feed available to readers.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  Google never made an public attempt to show ads in their Reader, unlike GMail. Publisher feeds were also still prospering and widely used when Google killed the reader. It all started to die fast in years after. Also, IIRC they specifically killed it because of Google Plus, which according to their plans should replace Google Reader and the demand for RSS.
- nl 6y ago
  Google says they killed Reader because of declining usage[1], and there was little reason to doubt that at the time. It's very true that people were switching to mobile consumption and no longer reading lots of news all at once. I was a heavy user of Reader (and did huge amounts of work on RSS/Atom/etc), and I agreed with this assessment at the time. More and more publishers were just putting headlines in RSS, so you had to click through anyway, and commercial blog sites were publishing a much larger volume of content, most of which I ignored. But I didn't want to unsubscribe, because occasionally there was something good. Given that, I was finding much better content through aggregators like HN or via Twitter/FB. Maybe they could have iterated and built something different, but what they had really wasn't useful. [1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/ https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/
apostacy 6y ago
> RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. > I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification. I don't think the solution should be to cater to what big platforms want. If we did that, then the logical conclusion of that is that we would have to download some bloated locked down app for each platform we wanted to visit, and we would have a plethora of walled gardens. Copying and pasting text would be very limited, and we certainly could not "view source". The best we could do to save content was take screen shots, we certainly could not click on an image and save it. Basically what they are doing now. Platforms would like nothing better than to completely deprecate access by web browsers all together. (Didn't Instagram do that recently?) Perhaps in the near future, websites will require that you use an "Apple approved" web browser, if they let you access them outside of the app at all. But, they fact that they present any of their content at all is because of the ubiquity of web browsers. They could probably make more money if they had complete control of their platform, and could do things like prevent ad-blocking. So, we should have pushed more for RSS to be de-facto requirement of serving content. Firefox, and other browsers, should have advertised when RSS was available, and make it highly discoverable for users. > The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today. I don't personally care that much about the protocol itself, I care about the content that the protocol makes available. If reading an RSS story required unpacking a bloated js runtime and fetching even more content, then why not just use a browser? Publishers also hate SMTP and IMAP, and would love to force users to log into their platform and view ads, just to send an email to someone. And Google is certainly doing their part to eventually kill off these protocols. AOL and many 90s ISPs did not support these protocols either (even though they used them internally) because they wanted to make users log into their platform instead of using their own mail client. But the reason that SMTP still exists today is because of its ubiquity. The more RSS is adopted, the more popular it becomes, and the more platforms had to support it, even if they did not want to. Being able to programmatically send emails is incredibly useful and helpful. I'm sure that when the last SMTP server shuts down, they will tell you that it is ok, because you can still use the mutually incompatible GMail or Outlook.com APIs. Pending approval.
VLM 6y ago
Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space. I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years. Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spam and tax themselves, and the authors obviously don't mind not monetizing or they wouldn't be blogging to begin with. There doesn't seem to be an obvious disruptive force or angle to apply force to "improve" the stable situation of a distributed decentralized happy unmonetized ecosystem.
- varenc 6y ago
  For the blogs and writers you follow that use RSS, are they really choosing to forgo a meaningful monetization opportunity? Unless a blog really has ~50,000+ daily uniques, or a lucractive audience niche, I suspect there’s not much opportunity to monetize even if they wanted to.
  - 6510 6y ago
    Their headlines in my aggregator are advertisement.
  - reanimated 6y ago
    Well, there are still affiliate links, you can still promote your own products like courses or books and invite readers to subscribe to paid newsletter. Most of my subscribed authors have Patreon now and it generates much more than ads would.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Quality content doesn't happen without costs.
  - noahtallen 6y ago
    A lot of top-quality dev blogs are written by people who have existing well-paying opportunities. A lot of these people aren’t making an income writing blogs, just sharing the lessons they’ve learned from their jobs. Dan Abramov’s blog is a good example.
dgudkov 6y ago
>1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred What you describe looks like authentication and authorization rather than payment processing. Which may be a good thing. Adding support for authentication to the RSS protocol (OAuth for RSS anyone?) and RSS clients can potentially make it more interesting for publishers and solve the problem with monetization.
carapace 6y ago
I think you gotta connect the dots with UBI here. You wouldn't have to monetize if you didn't have to monetize.
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  While I agree with this take on UBI. There are middle grounds to explore. The streaming and game services seems to point at monthly subscription fee from an aggregator as a working model. Not sure how they distribute royalties though, I suspect there are many models I won’t agree with based on what they incentivize. Then there are the Kickstarter/patreon. Where money is given more in support than for a specific product. This is more like the UBI approach. I think there is room for a hybrid approach here, merging the two.
  - carapace 6y ago
    I'm keeping my eye on a few people, like Abbadon who makes "Kill Six Billion Demons" and Andrew Kelley the creator of Zig. But really I think we need a major reconfiguration of our global economic structure.
aswanson 6y ago
+1. This is one of the areas where the profit motive leaders to a worse user experience in a competitive environment.
clarkmoody 6y ago
> 1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification. This is exactly the recently-proposed LSAT protocol[0]. It uses the HTTP402 response code to prompt for payment over the Lightning Network in exchange for a cryptographic bearer credential that may be used in future requests to the server. [0] https://lsat.tech/ https://lsat.tech/
aiilns 6y ago
Right now the top reply's first sentence is this: > Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space. I have noticed that people in hackernews generally tend to look things from a, excuse me for saying so, narrow business "make money" perspective. Or maybe it's somewhat US related, I'm not sure. There are thousands of sites that don't live from advertising. Government, universities, and every public or even private institute has a site to provide information, news, announcements etc. There are also hobbyists' sites who are never going to make money from adverts. Not everything should be reduced to a Facebook page. Not everything should be about money. First and foremost I think there is a need to recalibrate what matters and what actions that requires.
- xmprt 6y ago
  I do a lot of things for free because I have the luxury of a job that pays well. Not everyone has that kind of freedom and if someone wants to put food on the table, then money has to be a factor. Otherwise you'd lock a lot of things to only people who have extra time to take risks on activities that won't get them anything in return. Saying not everything should be about money is a pretty privileged position.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - wmeredith 6y ago
    This threshold has been measured. Everything stops being about money when household income hits about $70k-90k. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-much-money-you-need-to-be-truly-happy-earning-more-wont-help-2018-02-14 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-much-m...
  - imgabe 6y ago
    Not every activity needs to be a viable way to make money. If you're struggling to put food on the table, maybe you should explore other avenues for making money besides blogging. If you want to write, there are lots of ways to get paid for writing. Everyone has activities they enjoy that don't produce any income. Just because people enjoy an activity doesn't mean that there has to be a way to make a living from it. People enjoy playing video games, riding horses, sailing, painting. For most people they will not be able to support themselves with these things and we generally don't think that we have to go out of our way to make it possible for them to, so why is blogging different? The general order of business goes "Here is something people are willing to pay money for -> You can do this and make money" not "Here is something I want people to pay me money for -> Pay me money for this"
evantahler 6y ago
I've seen a number of news RSS feeds that only give you the first paragraph or a summary in RSS, and to get the rest, you need to log into the site (paywall). I think this is quite an OK RSS business model - it's like a preview, and you pay to get the rest.
wasdfff 6y ago
But the thing is, it’s not dead nor dying. I don’t think very many major websites have stopped their rss feeds. Maybe it’s just you that isn’t using it. There is rarely a webpage that I find that can’t be followed via rss, either natively which is most always the case, but there are also services that an rss-ize content.
- gregn 6y ago
  Agree here. I don't think many sites have either. You have to dig a little, open the code-behind, but they're there.
bhargav 6y ago
The protocols are designs as small layers and on top of one-another. I wouldn't expect a new protocol to be invented every year or even decades. I think what you mentioned could be accomplished using existing protocols. There isn't a need for a new protocol for this specific purpose. For this specific purpose, what if we just had personalized/signed RSS feeds per payer?
leemcalilly 6y ago
How is it any harder for a publisher to embed a display ad than do what John Gruber does and have a weekly sponsor in his RSS feed? It's easy to insert ads into any RSS feed. The publisher/advertising argument for the death of RSS doesn't hold water. Folks prefer Twitter and Facebook to get a feed of news. The majority of people don't want to do the work of manually curating their feed. RSS just didn't win on the merits as a feature. I still love RSS and use it every day, but it wasn't "killed by publishers."
SllX 6y ago
Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reader, but it’s just another means of syndicating media. The same places that disseminate the full text continue to do so because they’re not invested in making money directly off the writing, and the same places that have an investment in you going directly to the site continue to operate their feeds in that manner. If you have a browser extension that can discover it, or are willing to do a bit of guesswork, it’s amazing how many new sites launched in the last year that might not expose it on the website (because the webmaster didn’t think it was important to expose even when the CMS has it) actually have a feed you can pass off to a reader. I don’t think RSS is ever going be competitive with a service like Instagram or Reddit for what they do, but the full value of these services doesn’t lie entirely within a feed and wouldn’t be neatly exposed within the constraints of the RSS or Atom specs to begin with. It’s different, and therefore have other, albeit less popular than social media, uses. If someone prefers a stream of photographs to a stream of blogs and news sites, and that’s a lot of people, then RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention. If somebody prefers the discussions on Reddit and the semi-randomness of sources, RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention either. If you don’t care about an image stream (with comments, reactions, stories and whatever else Instagram has), and you can do without the Reddit commentary, well, you may very well have a use for RSS. Or maybe not. If it hasn’t gone away yet (and it really hasn’t), I have a hard time believing it is going anywhere in the near future.
- tlavoie 6y ago
  While RSS doesn't replace a site like Reddit, it's great that Reddit has RSS support built-in. Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.
  - SllX 6y ago
deanCommie 6y ago
Someone explain to me why the following combination of steps wouldn't solve all problems - for both content publishers, and RSS app creators. Content publishers: Update the RSS feed generator to include the ads associated with the post. Write tools for dynamic ad insertion that actually updates the syndicated feed. RSS App creators: Build ad networks that work with both ad buyers and content creators to match content-relevant ads, and either replace the dynamic in-post ads (and share revenue), or add additional intra-post ads. Someone explain to me why this couldn't work with the existing technology stack - no new protocol, or client-side changes required.
- musicale 6y ago
  It wouldn't work because it doesn't support the intrusive tracking (including "telemetry" and "analytics"), giant slide-over windows that obscure the content, repeated pop-ups demanding your email address, announcements that "you have 1 free article remaining unless you pay for a subscription," social media integration buttons, solicitations to "download our mobile app," CAPTCHA loops, "DDoS protection" delays and redirects, ad-blocker-blockers and autoplaying videos that are integral to web sites in 2020. Also it is too lightweight in terms of cpu, memory, network and power usage, so it wouldn't push users to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware (and data plans) every year just to maintain the same performance they had last year.
artembugara 6y ago
I am building my business fully based on RSS. It is a news API. I got all my data solely form RSS. And I can confirm that the vast majority of news outlets still have it. https://newscatcherapi.com/ https://newscatcherapi.com/ I probably should write a post with exact numbers: * how frequently it is updated * how many websites still support it * etc
ymolodtsov 6y ago
RSS is very much alive and aggregators like Feedly are way more powerful than Google Reader. All media website still use them, and even some major ones post full-text, The Verge does that, for example. Monetization is rather simple, people visit a website if they want to read more about the news. In exchange you get guaranteed access to their attention not intermediated by Facebook, Google or Twitter.
dfsegoat 6y ago
Re: rss being dead, many US govt sites still have RSS feeds for data updates and even your saved searches: - PubMed - Dailymed - clinicaltrials.gov Slack has a slash command for ‘/feed subscribe https://foo.bar/baz.rss’ https://foo.bar/baz.rss’ so we use that plus the above sites RSS feed for real time notices on when new data is added.

xtracto 6y ago

So maybe a combination of RSS and Brave?

zelly 6y ago

Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. What is happening is that the only publishers that will exist shall be only those who create it for free. There is simply a glut of content out there because the barrier to creating content is completely gone.

hinkley 6y ago
Free, loss leader, or honeypot. Most places use content to get you to look at ads, but some places write content as a sort of ad itself - we said something thoughtful to build brand recognition, consumer confidence.
- methou 6y ago
  Ja, I've seen enough of these sites, the content is awful but filled the first pages in my Google search. I used to call them malicious SEO sites, but your point makes better sense than my hatred.
KajMagnus 6y ago
> Micropayments have been tried. They all failed Would be interesting to read about that — you happen to have any links? I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: "One type of micropayment that does work — one you might not even think of as a micropayment — is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP are a huge source of revenue [...]" And: "One reason users don’t like micropayments for content [to read] is it requires a decision ... waste the users’ mental effort ... costs so little that its implied worth is almost nothing" (here: https://blog.applovin.com/why-micropayments-fail-and-one-notable-success-story/ https://blog.applovin.com/why-micropayments-fail-and-one-not... )
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- zelly 6y ago
  Sure, just look around, do you see any successful micropayments processing companies? Do you use any of them? If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question. There was a wave of micropayments startups about 6 years ago. The only one I remember is Flattr. The crypto bubble came and gave new hope because maybe the reason micropayments failed before was the credit card processing fees. Nope, still didn't work. I don't use Brave Rewards and have never heard of anyone making more than pennies with it. Xanadu was one of the original visions of the internet from the 1960s. It sounded like a lot of the idealistic plans people come up with for micropayments where content creators can collect micropayments from viewers. Of course it didn't work. Micropayments is an absolute cemetery of a business model.
  - KajMagnus 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply, didn't know about Xanadu. Didn't come to think about Flattr. > If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question If you change from to: "successful" to "hugely successful in all English speaking countries" then I agree ... almost, But there're also different continents and countries and different languages ... Which prompted me to now search for "Chinese micropayments" — and: > "[the company's] growing profit margins are riding the wave of China's exploding media micropayment economy" https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-music-uses-tipping-to-rack-up-revenues-why-arent-western-music-streaming-platforms-doing-the-same/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-music-uses-ti... Reading a bit more on different sites: Apparently this started 5 years ago and has been working well, in China. Micropayments. A little bit I got the impression it's currently being used primarily for tipping.
Dotnaught 6y ago
>The fair market price for content is $0. That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, and so on. The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the Googles and Facebooks of the world: When all content is equal, no content creator has any negotiating power. But there's a distinction between a multi-month investigative report and hastily paraphrased rewrite at some fly-by-night website intent on capturing algorithmic ad dollars. Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed. It's worth asking how much we will pay for reports on political corruption, civic injustice, and so on. If the price for content is $0, the signal to noise ratio will disappear.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I think journalism is going to have to clean up its act a lot before I'm willing to trust it enough to pay for it. I'm seeing more credible journalism done by bloggers than the mainstream media at the moment.
- zelly 6y ago
  I meant "content" as in cultural content--articles, Q&A submissions, blog posts, takes, memes, recipes, how-tos, tutorials. Content that makes up >80% of G search results. At one time, there was a price for such content because you could only get it from a print publication or from broadcast television. Now that there are no barriers to posting, we see how many people actually want to publish content even if they have to pay out of pocket to host it (i.e., making the price of their content negative since the consumer gets to freeload bandwidth without ads and consume content). > Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed. You're suggesting that journalism is a public good because the value is captured by society as a whole as opposed to by the individual newspaper subscriber. I wouldn't argue against investigative journalism being important for democracy etc., but why does it need to cost anything (even by the public)? What about the whole Harvey Weinstein/MeToo saga which started after some individuals made some tweets without being paid by a journalism company to do so. There is no shortage of outraged citizen activists who will do "investigative journalism". I don't know why their free work should automatically be considered inferior just because they don't have a journalism degree and aren't being paid by a journalism company.
ericflo 6y ago
What about games? People pay tons of money for them, and they are content too. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out later this year, try telling people it's worth $0. I think the difference is social norms. The internet having no real built-in payment mechanism has obliterated the norm of paying for most content. Games have held the line, but things like Google Stadia and Apple Arcade are working to change that.
- zelly 6y ago
  A game is intellectual property like a movie. If I copy and paste 1/5th of your game, you can sue me and win. If I copy and paste 1/5th of your blog post, as long as I put quote marks around it, I'm safe. Games won't become free until it's easy for commoners to make them. Even with Unity and all the easy plug and chug game dev resources, it's still hard and requires multiple people with different talents.
  - schmudde 6y ago
    It's social norms and perceived value (which are interrelated). From sampling music to quoting literature - there is case precedent and fair use. Software is no different. When Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, the standards were incredibly high. If I violate a GPL license or steal some copywritten Unity code for my game - I'm probably pretty safe. Unless, of course, a bunch of people agree that my software is valuable. I could be in big trouble if that's the case, even if I give it away for free (as in beer) and never make a cent off it.
slightwinder 6y ago
> Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. To be fair, most were aweful and never reached critical mass. And many were to early and badly placed. Today situation is different. Patreon, twitch, youtube, netflix, spotify and all the other paid services proof that people are willing to pay something for content, to their conditions. I think a well implemented micro-payment could work out today well enough to be viable. Something build into the browsers and aggregator-sites (reddit, hackernews, google news, facebook...) first. Most users don't wanna waste their time with micromanaging their bills, so make it optional, and automate it for the rest of the time.
rb808 6y ago
>The fair market price for content is $0. I would have agree with this two years ago but things have changed. I'm just worn down with the huge volume of free dross that doesn't tell you anything. This year I've started subscribing to a bunch of resources and stopped with google news/fb noise.
zrail 6y ago
The legions of small publishers making a living on substack beg to differ.
- nl 6y ago
  1) Subscription is not the same thing as micropayments (as they are commonly understood) 2) It's pretty unclear to me that Substack actually lets "legions" of writers make a living. https://substack.com/discover https://substack.com/discover lists the top (income making?) writers, and it drops off very quickly. By number 25, it is "hundreds of subscribers" paying $10/month. That's a nice hobby income but isn't really "a living".

worble 6y ago

> This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked. Is this that bad? I personally don't mind this at all, I subscribe to RSS feeds so I can easily tell at a glance who has an update in one place. If they then want to redirect me for the full content, then so be it, especially if the alternative is me loading every single one of those sites every day to check anyway.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I do mind such RSS feeds that just try to force people to load the webpage. With the vast majority of my RSS feeds, I never have to leave Emacs’ Elfeed RSS reader to consume daily news. If a feed won't let me see the full content in RSS, then I am more likely to delete the feed than become a pair of eyeballs for the website’s advertisers.
- k1m 6y ago
  I work on a project to convert partial feeds into full-text versions. It pulls in the article content from each feed item and then creates a new full-text feed. Feel free to try it out here: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/ http://ftr.fivefilters.org/
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lordgrenville 6y ago
    If somebody chooses to make their (complete) writing available only on their site, I can choose not to read it (and often do!) But I don't think it's right to pull it from their site and repackage it.
HunOL 6y ago
Absolutely agree. I just can't get why in every discussion about RSS somebody mentions that y it's dead because publishers had to give away content for free. Feed could contain full article, but don't have to.

bastawhiz 6y ago

> This is why Google killed it. Is this true? It certainly doesn't feel like it. Reader was a first party branded reader. Google could put ads on Reader relevant to your interests (which they'd have been more keenly aware of than if you weren't using Reader), and they didn't have to pay out the publishers. Google killed Reader, I think, for the second reason you mentioned: publishers were neutering their feeds. Reader had gone from a tool for consuming content to a tool for being notified about content.

DevX101 6y ago
Google would have been rightfully sued to hell and back if they started putting ads in the reader client with no compensation back to the publishers.
- jefftk 6y ago
  Why? Many RSS readers have ads, and the publisher is making their feed available to readers.
slightwinder 6y ago
Google never made an public attempt to show ads in their Reader, unlike GMail. Publisher feeds were also still prospering and widely used when Google killed the reader. It all started to die fast in years after. Also, IIRC they specifically killed it because of Google Plus, which according to their plans should replace Google Reader and the demand for RSS.
nl 6y ago
Google says they killed Reader because of declining usage[1], and there was little reason to doubt that at the time. It's very true that people were switching to mobile consumption and no longer reading lots of news all at once. I was a heavy user of Reader (and did huge amounts of work on RSS/Atom/etc), and I agreed with this assessment at the time. More and more publishers were just putting headlines in RSS, so you had to click through anyway, and commercial blog sites were publishing a much larger volume of content, most of which I ignored. But I didn't want to unsubscribe, because occasionally there was something good. Given that, I was finding much better content through aggregators like HN or via Twitter/FB. Maybe they could have iterated and built something different, but what they had really wasn't useful. [1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/ https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/

apostacy 6y ago

> RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. > I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification. I don't think the solution should be to cater to what big platforms want. If we did that, then the logical conclusion of that is that we would have to download some bloated locked down app for each platform we wanted to visit, and we would have a plethora of walled gardens. Copying and pasting text would be very limited, and we certainly could not "view source". The best we could do to save content was take screen shots, we certainly could not click on an image and save it. Basically what they are doing now. Platforms would like nothing better than to completely deprecate access by web browsers all together. (Didn't Instagram do that recently?) Perhaps in the near future, websites will require that you use an "Apple approved" web browser, if they let you access them outside of the app at all. But, they fact that they present any of their content at all is because of the ubiquity of web browsers. They could probably make more money if they had complete control of their platform, and could do things like prevent ad-blocking. So, we should have pushed more for RSS to be de-facto requirement of serving content. Firefox, and other browsers, should have advertised when RSS was available, and make it highly discoverable for users. > The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today. I don't personally care that much about the protocol itself, I care about the content that the protocol makes available. If reading an RSS story required unpacking a bloated js runtime and fetching even more content, then why not just use a browser? Publishers also hate SMTP and IMAP, and would love to force users to log into their platform and view ads, just to send an email to someone. And Google is certainly doing their part to eventually kill off these protocols. AOL and many 90s ISPs did not support these protocols either (even though they used them internally) because they wanted to make users log into their platform instead of using their own mail client. But the reason that SMTP still exists today is because of its ubiquity. The more RSS is adopted, the more popular it becomes, and the more platforms had to support it, even if they did not want to. Being able to programmatically send emails is incredibly useful and helpful. I'm sure that when the last SMTP server shuts down, they will tell you that it is ok, because you can still use the mutually incompatible GMail or Outlook.com APIs. Pending approval.

VLM 6y ago

Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space. I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years. Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spam and tax themselves, and the authors obviously don't mind not monetizing or they wouldn't be blogging to begin with. There doesn't seem to be an obvious disruptive force or angle to apply force to "improve" the stable situation of a distributed decentralized happy unmonetized ecosystem.

varenc 6y ago
For the blogs and writers you follow that use RSS, are they really choosing to forgo a meaningful monetization opportunity? Unless a blog really has ~50,000+ daily uniques, or a lucractive audience niche, I suspect there’s not much opportunity to monetize even if they wanted to.
- 6510 6y ago
  Their headlines in my aggregator are advertisement.
- reanimated 6y ago
  Well, there are still affiliate links, you can still promote your own products like courses or books and invite readers to subscribe to paid newsletter. Most of my subscribed authors have Patreon now and it generates much more than ads would.
ineedasername 6y ago
Quality content doesn't happen without costs.
- noahtallen 6y ago
  A lot of top-quality dev blogs are written by people who have existing well-paying opportunities. A lot of these people aren’t making an income writing blogs, just sharing the lessons they’ve learned from their jobs. Dan Abramov’s blog is a good example.

dgudkov 6y ago

>1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred What you describe looks like authentication and authorization rather than payment processing. Which may be a good thing. Adding support for authentication to the RSS protocol (OAuth for RSS anyone?) and RSS clients can potentially make it more interesting for publishers and solve the problem with monetization.

carapace 6y ago

I think you gotta connect the dots with UBI here. You wouldn't have to monetize if you didn't have to monetize.

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
While I agree with this take on UBI. There are middle grounds to explore. The streaming and game services seems to point at monthly subscription fee from an aggregator as a working model. Not sure how they distribute royalties though, I suspect there are many models I won’t agree with based on what they incentivize. Then there are the Kickstarter/patreon. Where money is given more in support than for a specific product. This is more like the UBI approach. I think there is room for a hybrid approach here, merging the two.
- carapace 6y ago
  I'm keeping my eye on a few people, like Abbadon who makes "Kill Six Billion Demons" and Andrew Kelley the creator of Zig. But really I think we need a major reconfiguration of our global economic structure.

aswanson 6y ago

+1. This is one of the areas where the profit motive leaders to a worse user experience in a competitive environment.

clarkmoody 6y ago

> 1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification. This is exactly the recently-proposed LSAT protocol[0]. It uses the HTTP402 response code to prompt for payment over the Lightning Network in exchange for a cryptographic bearer credential that may be used in future requests to the server. [0] https://lsat.tech/ https://lsat.tech/

aiilns 6y ago

Right now the top reply's first sentence is this: > Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space. I have noticed that people in hackernews generally tend to look things from a, excuse me for saying so, narrow business "make money" perspective. Or maybe it's somewhat US related, I'm not sure. There are thousands of sites that don't live from advertising. Government, universities, and every public or even private institute has a site to provide information, news, announcements etc. There are also hobbyists' sites who are never going to make money from adverts. Not everything should be reduced to a Facebook page. Not everything should be about money. First and foremost I think there is a need to recalibrate what matters and what actions that requires.

xmprt 6y ago
I do a lot of things for free because I have the luxury of a job that pays well. Not everyone has that kind of freedom and if someone wants to put food on the table, then money has to be a factor. Otherwise you'd lock a lot of things to only people who have extra time to take risks on activities that won't get them anything in return. Saying not everything should be about money is a pretty privileged position.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wmeredith 6y ago
  This threshold has been measured. Everything stops being about money when household income hits about $70k-90k. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-much-money-you-need-to-be-truly-happy-earning-more-wont-help-2018-02-14 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-much-m...
- imgabe 6y ago
  Not every activity needs to be a viable way to make money. If you're struggling to put food on the table, maybe you should explore other avenues for making money besides blogging. If you want to write, there are lots of ways to get paid for writing. Everyone has activities they enjoy that don't produce any income. Just because people enjoy an activity doesn't mean that there has to be a way to make a living from it. People enjoy playing video games, riding horses, sailing, painting. For most people they will not be able to support themselves with these things and we generally don't think that we have to go out of our way to make it possible for them to, so why is blogging different? The general order of business goes "Here is something people are willing to pay money for -> You can do this and make money" not "Here is something I want people to pay me money for -> Pay me money for this"

evantahler 6y ago

I've seen a number of news RSS feeds that only give you the first paragraph or a summary in RSS, and to get the rest, you need to log into the site (paywall). I think this is quite an OK RSS business model - it's like a preview, and you pay to get the rest.

wasdfff 6y ago

But the thing is, it’s not dead nor dying. I don’t think very many major websites have stopped their rss feeds. Maybe it’s just you that isn’t using it. There is rarely a webpage that I find that can’t be followed via rss, either natively which is most always the case, but there are also services that an rss-ize content.

gregn 6y ago
Agree here. I don't think many sites have either. You have to dig a little, open the code-behind, but they're there.

bhargav 6y ago

The protocols are designs as small layers and on top of one-another. I wouldn't expect a new protocol to be invented every year or even decades. I think what you mentioned could be accomplished using existing protocols. There isn't a need for a new protocol for this specific purpose. For this specific purpose, what if we just had personalized/signed RSS feeds per payer?

leemcalilly 6y ago

How is it any harder for a publisher to embed a display ad than do what John Gruber does and have a weekly sponsor in his RSS feed? It's easy to insert ads into any RSS feed. The publisher/advertising argument for the death of RSS doesn't hold water. Folks prefer Twitter and Facebook to get a feed of news. The majority of people don't want to do the work of manually curating their feed. RSS just didn't win on the merits as a feature. I still love RSS and use it every day, but it wasn't "killed by publishers."

SllX 6y ago

Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reader, but it’s just another means of syndicating media. The same places that disseminate the full text continue to do so because they’re not invested in making money directly off the writing, and the same places that have an investment in you going directly to the site continue to operate their feeds in that manner. If you have a browser extension that can discover it, or are willing to do a bit of guesswork, it’s amazing how many new sites launched in the last year that might not expose it on the website (because the webmaster didn’t think it was important to expose even when the CMS has it) actually have a feed you can pass off to a reader. I don’t think RSS is ever going be competitive with a service like Instagram or Reddit for what they do, but the full value of these services doesn’t lie entirely within a feed and wouldn’t be neatly exposed within the constraints of the RSS or Atom specs to begin with. It’s different, and therefore have other, albeit less popular than social media, uses. If someone prefers a stream of photographs to a stream of blogs and news sites, and that’s a lot of people, then RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention. If somebody prefers the discussions on Reddit and the semi-randomness of sources, RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention either. If you don’t care about an image stream (with comments, reactions, stories and whatever else Instagram has), and you can do without the Reddit commentary, well, you may very well have a use for RSS. Or maybe not. If it hasn’t gone away yet (and it really hasn’t), I have a hard time believing it is going anywhere in the near future.

tlavoie 6y ago
While RSS doesn't replace a site like Reddit, it's great that Reddit has RSS support built-in. Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.
- SllX 6y ago

deanCommie 6y ago

Someone explain to me why the following combination of steps wouldn't solve all problems - for both content publishers, and RSS app creators. Content publishers: Update the RSS feed generator to include the ads associated with the post. Write tools for dynamic ad insertion that actually updates the syndicated feed. RSS App creators: Build ad networks that work with both ad buyers and content creators to match content-relevant ads, and either replace the dynamic in-post ads (and share revenue), or add additional intra-post ads. Someone explain to me why this couldn't work with the existing technology stack - no new protocol, or client-side changes required.

musicale 6y ago
It wouldn't work because it doesn't support the intrusive tracking (including "telemetry" and "analytics"), giant slide-over windows that obscure the content, repeated pop-ups demanding your email address, announcements that "you have 1 free article remaining unless you pay for a subscription," social media integration buttons, solicitations to "download our mobile app," CAPTCHA loops, "DDoS protection" delays and redirects, ad-blocker-blockers and autoplaying videos that are integral to web sites in 2020. Also it is too lightweight in terms of cpu, memory, network and power usage, so it wouldn't push users to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware (and data plans) every year just to maintain the same performance they had last year.

artembugara 6y ago

I am building my business fully based on RSS. It is a news API. I got all my data solely form RSS. And I can confirm that the vast majority of news outlets still have it. https://newscatcherapi.com/ https://newscatcherapi.com/ I probably should write a post with exact numbers: * how frequently it is updated * how many websites still support it * etc

ymolodtsov 6y ago

RSS is very much alive and aggregators like Feedly are way more powerful than Google Reader. All media website still use them, and even some major ones post full-text, The Verge does that, for example. Monetization is rather simple, people visit a website if they want to read more about the news. In exchange you get guaranteed access to their attention not intermediated by Facebook, Google or Twitter.

dfsegoat 6y ago

Re: rss being dead, many US govt sites still have RSS feeds for data updates and even your saved searches: - PubMed - Dailymed - clinicaltrials.gov Slack has a slash command for ‘/feed subscribe https://foo.bar/baz.rss’ https://foo.bar/baz.rss’ so we use that plus the above sites RSS feed for real time notices on when new data is added.