Using ATOM, RSS or another syndication feed for paid content

Question

I work for a publishing house and we're discussing different ways to sell our content over digital channels.

Besides the web, we're closely watching the development of content publishing on tablets (e.g. iPad) and smartphones (e.g. iPhone). Right now, it looks like there are four different approaches:

1. Conventional publishing houses release Apps like The Daily, Wired or Time Magazine. Personally I name them Print-Content-Meets-Offline-Website Magazines. Very nice to look at, but slow, very heavy regarding datasize and often inconsistent on the usability side. Besides that: These magazines don't co-exist well in a world where Facebook and Twitter is where users spend most of their time and share content.
2. Plain and stupid PDF. More or less lightweight, but as interactive and shareable as a granite block. A model mostly used by conventional publishers and apps like Zinio.
3. Websites with customized views for different devices (like Die Zeit's tablet-enhanced website). Lightweight, but (at least until now) not able to really exploit a hardware platform as a native app can.
4. Apps like Flipboard, Reeder or Zite go a different way: Relaying on Twitter-, Facebook- and/or syndication-feeds like RSS and Atom, they give the user a very personalized way to consume news and media. Besides that, the data behind it is as lightweight as possible, the architecture to distribute the data is fast and has proven for years to be reliable.

Personally, I think #4 is the way to go. Unluckily the mentioned Apps only distribute free content and as a publishing house we're also interested in distributing paid content.

I did some research googled around and came to the conclusion, that there is no standardized way to protect and sell individual articles in a syndication feed.

My question: Do you have any hints or ideas how this could be implemented in a plattform-agnostic way? Or is there an existing solution I just haven't found yet?

Update: This article explains exactly what we're looking for:

"What publishers and developers need is a standard API that enables distribution of content for authorized purposes, monitors its use, offers standard advertising units and subscription requirements, and provides a way to share revenues."

Answer 1

Just brainstorming, so take it for what it's worth:

Feedreaders can't do buying but most of them have at least let you authenticate to feeds, right? If your free feed was authenticated, you would be able to tie the retrieval of atom entries to a given user account. The retrieval could check the user account against purchased articles and make sure they were populated with fully paid content.

For unpurchased content, the feed gets populated with a link that takes you to a Buy The Article page. You adjust that user account and the next time the feed is updated, the feed gets shows the full content. You could even offer "article tracks" or something like that where someone can by everything written by a given author or everything matching some search criteria. You could adjust rates accordingly.

You also want to be able to allow people to refer articles to others via social media sites and blogs and so forth. To facilitate this, the article URLs (and the atom entry ids) would need to be the same whether they are purchased or not. Only the content of the feed changes depending on the status of the account accessing the feed.

The trick, it seems to me, is providing enough enticement to get people to create an account. Presumably, you'd need interesting things to read and probably some percentage of it free so that it leaves people wanting more.

Another problem is preventing redistribution of paid content to free channels. I don't know that there is a way to completely prevent this. You'd need to monitor the usage of your feeds by account to look for access anomalies, but it's a hard problem.

Answer 2

Solution we're currently following:

We'll use the same Atom feed for paid and free content. A paid content entry in the feed will have no content (besides title, summary, etc.). If a user chooses to buy that content, the missing content is fetched from a webservice and inserted into the feed.

Downside: The buying-process is not implemented in any existing feedreader.

Anyone got a better idea?

Answer 3

I was looking for something else, but I've came across with Flattr RSS plugin for WordPress.

I didn't have time to look it through, but maybe you can find some useful ideas in it.