Paid-Subscription RSS Feeds

With all the recent talking about RSS monetization, selling access to RSS feeds via a paid-subscription model is certainly one way of doing it.

And true to form, there's already a new company offering exactly this service, promising to make the paid-subscription process easy, simple and inexpensive, which is exactly what small-business content publishers need, especially if they don't want to invest in the paid-subscription infrastructure.

For publishers, the RSS Bazaar, dubbing itself as the RSS superstore, provides a mechanism to directly monetize their RSS content without any greater investments. For end-users, this same system is used to grant access to and manage paid-access RSS feeds.

"Based on Hexlet's unique Syndication Platform, RSS Bazaar makes it easy for content providers to monetize their investment in RSS infrastructure. According to Hexlet CEO Prashant Parekh, "We make it easy for providers to get their content to the public. They give us content and we take care of selling, billing, distribution, and support. It is completely hassle-free, and we promise to have their offerings up and running within twenty-four hours. No other RSS company offers such speedy turnaround." RSS and ATOM content can be sold on RSS Bazaar on a subscription or per-item basis."

If you'd like to take a look at this by yourself (as a publisher), just use this link, as they've done a really good job of hiding it on the site.

Signing-up to provide your own paid-subscription feed through this system unfortunatelly cannot be done automatically, but instead requires direct contact with the company.

Will this work?

Really too early to tell, but the concept is interesting. Paid-subscription RSS feeds should be no different than paid-subscription e-mail e-zines or even print newsletters --- it's all about the content and whether people are ready to pay for it or not.