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Ask HN: Are Paid RSS Feeds Possible?
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 18y agoYou 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 18y agothere 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 18y agoDaring Fireball does this. See: http://daringfireball.net/members/info http://daringfireball.net/members/info
- bootload 18y 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 18y agoI 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 18y agoI presume Google Reader only fetches a feed once for its many users. So how did you control access? (IFrames?)