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Email ads are more effective than RSS. The reader's email address is known (obviously!) and the content can be targeted individually. RSS is typically a single
by mmahemoff 5y ago
Email ads are more effective than RSS. The reader's email address is known (obviously!) and the content can be targeted individually. RSS is typically a single feed for everyone.
Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is high and aggregators often inadvertently leak premium links. In contrast, someone's inbox is about as private as it gets.
- gen220 5y agoYou can mitigate link sharing by counting the feed reader hits per link (anything more than two standard deviations is probably a shared link, which you can set a revocation policy for). You can reject requests to content that don’t have a non-revoked referrer. This way, they can only get your content by copy-pasting content and rehosting the feed, which is an unavoidable risk. In any case, as Netflix’s early history shows, depending on your cost structure, link sharing is likely a net positive. It’s probably only worth prosecuting the feeds that get shared with 100s of people. It definitely is more complicated, but the tools to make it simple are easy to build! Maybe we’ll see growth in this space. One can dream
- mmahemoff 5y agoYou can, albeit with some effort involved, e.g. Ben Thomson has mentioned Stratechery does some kind of link counting like that with the podcast feed. It's a good point that some amount of unauthorised sharing can be a positive. The main issue is it's hard to control without also having false positives, where the paying subscriber is annoyed by their service being revoked, having to re-auth, etc.