"jdklub <pseudonym@mindspring.com>" <pseudonym@mindspring.com> wrote:
I would also like to see a discussion about pricing unfold. If I may ask, Julian, what would you be willing to pay for a similar feed? Is it something worth paying for at all? What do other people think? What is the magic price for a decently filtered, topical feed? Would you want to pay per feed/topic, or pay a site-wide fee and get as many feeds/topics as needed for your site? I ask because I could actually provide such feeds*, but have no idea what people are willing to pay for them, if anything at all. * not as high quality as moreover's (yet), but given a specific topic I would certainly be willing to work on finding sources for that topic, especially if someone was throwing a couple of bucks my way each month.
I think the price to general websites is dropping rapidly to zero. But there probably is still a monetary value for specific tailored feeds for corporates.
For any particular subject, it's becoming reasonably effective to collect a group of feeds from sites specifically focussed on the same subject. So the categorization is at the feed level. This works well for something like "WiFi". What's much harder and which may have value is collection and creation of a feed on something like "European Internet News". Most of the sources for this still don't produce RSS. And the topic is too broad to lend itself to simple keyword searches.
As for money, we're not a corporate, we're a community news site struggling to find ways of making just enough money to pay a very small team and make enough bonus to pay for the Christmas dinner. So frankly we wouldn't be prepared to pay anything. Rather, I'll find reasons why we didn't actually need a "European Internet News" feed.
Then there's Google. Google news is an amazingly powerful source and their word search works amazingly well. It would be great if they could return RSS as an alternative to html.
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