I am wondering if it is possible to offer paid rss feeds, where a user has to pay to subscribe to the feed. Not being a hacker myself, I am wondering if this is technically possible to manage? I don't think there are any services that allow for this functionality, however I just don't know if that is due to some technical aspect of stopping pirating or if just no one has found a use for the service?
<i>"... I am wondering if it is possible to offer paid rss feeds, where a user has to pay to subscribe to the feed. Not being a hacker myself, I am wondering if this is technically possible to manage? ..."</i><p>Bend the idea slightly & use the feed as (everyone else does) to disseminate (title, summary & word count restriction) & restrict the access to the document at the server. Unless of course the feed is time sensitive?
You can use HTTP authentication for feeds, which will allow you to enforce some sort of payment scheme. However, not all readers support authenticated feeds.
I implemented a little prototype of this. This is very doable. The beauty is that it didn't use HTTP-Auth, which meant that a user can be using Google Reader or another third-party browser, and still get access to the paid content only if they authenticated correctly, but this still happens from within the feed reader, without clicking back to the website.
there are feeds and sites that work like this and provide the functionality. i've subscribed to several pay-based podcasts that have done authentication in several ways and/or through services.