Making Money with Full RSS Feeds

I recently wrote about the struggle to get paid for free content and software, including the situation with full RSS feeds, it's going to be difficult to make money.

When Freakonomics recently moved to the New York Times web site, they switched the RSS feeds to partial feeds. When this happened, the small, but very loyal full-feed reading fans of the content shrieked like little girls who’d just dropped their ice cream cone on the pavement.

They’ll make their official decision on Monday. They need to get paid, and I don’t blame the NYT or the crew at Freakonomics if they say, “Sorry, you’ll have to live with it.” The situation with Freakonomics got me thinking about solutions.

I really enjoy full RSS feeds and someday I believe a significantly larger portion of the world will as well though this might still be a ways out. In the meanwhile we will see less and less full feeds. Unless someone designs (and this could be done in-house as well) a product to work with blogging software and other content management/web publishing services where when new content is “posted” it’s done in such a way that the following happens:

1. On your site, things work exactly as they always did
2. Somehow there is a mirrored version of the content that is automatically served up with advertisements in the body of the actual posted content. This would become the feeder for the full feed RSS content.

I don’t think this is a huge challenge, but it’s also not a teeny tiny one either. It has to work with various content publishing systems and with various ad serving technologies and not add anything to the administrative overhead.

I hope it gets built. I really love full RSS feeds on the iPhone. If it doesn’t get built, ultimately everyone will go partial feed.

Hopefully Google and others are already working on something like this.

Can We Get Everything We Want...for Free?

Fred Wilson wrote a great post about the need for two-way openness. He was referring to the features where you can receive things like Facebook friends’ status updates via RSS. Fred likes that this is available, however it’s not enough for him. He wants two-way openness. He wants to be able to update his status on Facebook via Twitter.

As an end user, I’m right there with Fred Wilson: let me use whatever I want, to do whatever I want! But if I were working at Facebook I’d be scratching my head and thinking, “How the hell are we going to make Fred happy AND generate lots of revenue?”

This, by the way is a problem, for even one-way openness. Especially as RSS usage increases – and I believe this is inevitable because you really can finally create “The Daily Me.”

I read Engadget religiously. But they send full feeds out via RSS, and I never (or hardly ever) actually go to Engadget’s web site. I don’t see ANY of the ads on their site.

I know sites are struggling with full-feed vs. partial feed for this very reason. I’d much rather see Dave Winer focusing on the issue of how to utilize RSS to the fullest and still make money than to worry about Jason Calacanis’ mid-life crisis or Mahalo. And that’s with ONE way communication.

Now enter two way communication. Let’s take Fred’s example. He wants a world where he can find out whatever is happening in his Facebook world via RSS, and he wants to be able to update things via services like Twitter. When will Fred ever actually log on to Facebook? How will Facebook make any money on him?

While Fred and many others (perhaps even me) might be willing to pay $10/mo. for such flexibility, I don’t think the masses would. And maybe that’s the model: Give Fred what he wants, but make him pay.

Will there be a company that rolls up a bunch of great content sites and packages “Full Feed RSS without ads!” for a fee? Will there be subscription models that allow us to use whatever tools we want without actually ever visiting a web site?

I think there will have to be.

Dave Winer vs. Jason Calacanis: Who ya Got?

Disclosure: I have met Jason, he recently bought me brunch and maybe as much as 10 years ago he ranked me in the Silicon Alley Reporter as one of the 100 most influential new media people in NY. All of his antics are not my cup of tea, but generally speaking I find him to be very engaging as well as entertaining. I did join the Facebook group “People who can’t help but love Jason Calacanis!”

I have never met Dave Winer, but since I already "pushed" in one "who ya got?" today, I got Dave Winer. RSS baby. Way more important than a free brunch, or being ranked as influential – and even more important than interesting and engaging conversation. I love, love RSS. I might even change my middle name so that my initials can be RSS. Really Simple Syndication is good, good stuff.

I probably agree with Dave that Jason is hypocritical for whining about spam and then shamelessly self promoting constantly. But one of my favorite quotes is Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. I’m not immune from that myself, neither is Jason, and neither probably is Dave “if I can’t profit from it why should I care?” Winer.

I understand the thinking, and I’m all for self-interest, but that seems over the top. Dave doesn’t care about Mahalo because he can’t develop for it, and that’s fine, but other than that they utilize RSS, the New York Times web site isn’t an “open platform”, but it’s still something that millions of people love to use.

Bottom line on Mahalo is if it can become very useful – more useful than other generic search then people will use it and not give a rat’s behind whether it’s a platform or not.

Still, I have to pick Dave even if he complains about the iPhone for the same reason he complains about Calacanis’ Mahalo. The iPhone isn’t a platform so Dave can’t figure out how to develop something that will make money on it. Oh freaking well. I say that because no “platform” came out of the blue to give us an iPhone. Could Apple have made the iPhone more of an open platform? I’m not really so sure.

I’m OK if Jason and his investors are the only ones who will make money off Mahalo if the service it provides is useful to the people who use it. As for the iPhone, it might be more useful if it were an open platform, but I am finding the first generation of the phone very, very useful, even with its flaws. If the mobile phone industry here in the USA itself was an open platform, I’d probably be more prone to siding with Dave. That the mobile phones here aren’t built around some open platform that allows you to switch your phone to another carrier, etc., is a big deal to me. That Dave can’t make money off the iPhone or Mahalo is not. But it was fun to think about for 10 minutes.

There’s lots of stuff I use every day that’s not a platform. It doesn’t matter if it’s technology or not. Comcast or Starbucks. I still give them my money. Am I supposed to boycott Comcast because Dave Winer and Fred Wilson haven’t figured out how to develop an application for Comcast they can make money off of?

The ironic thing to me here is this: the non-platform iPhone + i.bloglines.com (Bloglines feed reader for the iPhone) is the best RSS feed reading mechanism EVER (so far). I am able to absorb much, much more information more quickly than I ever have before. Hell, it’s SO easy and so fast, I want to get everything via RSS, even my freaking e-mail.

Still, I’m a massive hypocrite myself here, because when the Flash upgrade for the iPhone is released, if it blocks streaming in the same way that Sony’s PSP did, I will send Dave some flowers and ask him how I can assist in the quest to turn the iPhone into a platform. But hands down, it’s already the best portable media device I’ve ever used, plus the best feed reader I've ever used. That's pretty good for a generation 1 product.

I personally don’t care whether Mahalo is a platform or not and I’m sure I’ll never change my mind about that. As for the iPhone, I’ll let you know after the update that supports Flash finally comes out (I’m guessing in October).

Dave Winer’s contributions to the Internet are many, and significant though and not just RSS. It’s just that RSS significantly changed the way I access information. So even though I think “if I can’t make money off it, I just don’t care” seems a bit over-the-top to me, I got Dave Winer.

P.S. the conference where the Jason vs. Dave smack talk occured, Gnomedex was not a "software developers" conference, if it was, Dave's comments would've been completely reasonable. Since it wasn't, his comments seemed over-the-top to me.

P.P.S. Jason's English Bulldog, Toro is an amazing chick magnet -- if Jason let me borrow him for a few hours the next time he is in SF, I might swing over to Jason's side in this contest...