Allen Stern drums up a very interesting discussion today with his post “Would You Pay $1 For A Feed?“. While at first glance anyone reading might scoff, Allen asks that you lay aside for a second the way things are today and think about this with an open mind. I have to admit that when I heard about the notion of paying for a feed with the Amazon Kindle, I thought it was ridiculous, but the way Allen puts it, he makes some very good points, and judging from the comments, many seem to agree.

Basically Allen lays out a scenario in which blogs and other publications would for $1 a month offer a feed of their site, one with full stories, no ads, and mobile access across all devices. Now, users would not be required to buy this $1 feed, but if they did not they would instead perhaps get a free partial feed – that would require them to visit the actual site if they wanted to finish an article.

I know that when I first started blogging and figured out what a feed was, I started out with a partial feed for a couple of reasons. First, I heard horror stories about content scrapers would simply subscribe to feeds and then steal all of that site’s content without even having to visit said site. Second, I didn’t understand the point of sending your content out to all readers, I thought no one would ever visit my actual site again.

I quickly learned that it was considered bad form to have a partial feed, and so I switched to a full one, which of course was the correct move – getting your writing out to the largest interested audience is the main idea – but part of me still wonders if there isn’t a better way of doing things from a monetization perspective, as I now do have advertisements, and currently don’t advertise on my feed.

On the other hand, while $1 may seem like nothing, if you subscribe to a few hundred feeds, that few hundred dollars a month in feed dues would be rather unwelcome. However, thinking along the lines of what Allen is proposing, certainly not all feeds would be worthy of this full-feed charge. I know there are quite a few feeds – hell a lot of them – that I don’t fully read all that often, but rather skim over to see if there is anything good that I should be reading. A free partial feed seems like the perfect option for sites like these.

Furthermore, Allen’s best idea may be to bundle a bunch of like-minded feeds together to sell as a group at a discount. For example his “Tech Bundle” (in which he graciously includes yours truly) would consist of 10 tech sites for $4.95 a month. That would make each of those feeds effectively 50 cents a feed rather than the $1. He also has a “Making Money Bundle” with some of the best making-money-online blogs, and a “Search Bundle” with some top SEO blogs.

As a publisher I know I would definitely support something like this. Anytime there is less pressure to lure an advertiser I think can only help in terms of writing. However as Allen notes, a plan like this would only work if everyone was on board. If certain sites sat out, it would likely just harm those who tried to take this new path.

To me this is very much an extension of a debate that is hot in the music industry right now – just what exactly should be free? As indicated by Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment, it would seem that most people (obviously) don’t want to pay for something if they can get it free. But I’ve long had the mindset that I don’t mind paying for something as long as it’s a fair price, and it is not restricted by something like DRM. Artists are people too, they need to get paid for their work and not everyone is a Radiohead-sized band that can afford to potentially make no money and reap in the benefits from publicity alone.

The same applies to writing on the Internet. While magazines and newspapers have long had subscription fees on top of advertising, websites have only had advertising (though some famously like The Wall Street Journal still have pay-areas) from which to make money from. In many ways an RSS feed is like a magazine or newspaper subscription, especially going forward as mobile devices become better and better at reading them.

It’s all about convenience. You could go to a book store and read a full magazine for free, but you would have to sit there for about an hour or so; whereas if you subscribe, it would be delivered to your door and you could read it in comfort. Likewise you could sit at your computer reading sites for hours (as most of us now do), or eventually you could have those sites’ feeds on your mobile device to read from whenever and wherever you want.

It’s a very interesting idea and a discussion that could become pertinent over the next couple of years as mobile computing really begins to take off.