FeedPass makes RSS subscription and monetizing other peoples' content easy
People around the web have been talking about the RSS support service FeedPass, which as you can see in action here at a FeedPass page for my personal blog, or this NYTimes feed I've wrapped in AdSense and split …
Context & Ripple Effects
FeedPass arrives into an RSS ecosystem already arguing over what a feed is for. FeedBurner had spent December adding interactivity inside feeds with FeedFlare, and Matt McAlister's publisher-distribution plan had framed feeds as a channel publishers could package rather than just pipe out.
What FeedPass changes is direction: instead of the publisher enhancing its own feed, anyone can take someone else's feed — the writeup demonstrates with an AdSense-wrapped NYTimes feed — subscribe through it, and share in the ad revenue. That lands squarely on two open wounds from earlier coverage: the industry-wide RSS usability mess flagged at the Blog Business Summit, and the unresolved copyright status of syndicated content.
First-order effects
- Publishers like the New York Times face third parties inserting ads into their feeds and taking a cut of the revenue, without any agreement with the publisher.
Second-order effects
- Feed-management platforms such as FeedBurner are pushed toward bundling monetization themselves before wrapper services intermediate their relationships with publishers.
Third-order effects
- If feed-wrapping spreads, the fight over who may monetize syndicated content moves from theory — where the copyright-of-RSS debate sat in early 2006 — to enforcement between publishers and intermediary platforms.
The trend: RSS is becoming a monetizable surface, shifting value in syndication from the publishers who create feeds to the intermediaries who package them.