News feeds - commercial vs personal use

What do you think about this idea

[jam937]

Hello, I wanted to get some honest feedback on an idea I had.

I recently had to find a news feed to incorporate into a commercial software application. Most news feeds (RSS, etc) are for non-commercial use. News feeds to be used for commercial purposes are usually expensive. There are some "free" ones but they add advertising links and such. It took a long time to find a news feed that would allow us to use it for commercial purposes, but we got one.

Here is my idea

1. Provide a news feed that can be used on commercial websites
2. Data would include headlines, dates and full articles
3. News would be pushed out hourly to subscribers in RSS, XML or some other format.
4. Subscribers can store in memory, file or database
5. Subscribers can use anywhere on their site without the need for external links
6. Would give the appearance their site is constantly updated

My questions are:

1. Will this idea work?
If yes then ..
2. How much should I charge? (25/yr, 50/yr, etc)
3. How can I market this idea?
4. Would an affiliate program work or just complicate things?

Thanks

[rodolp]

Hi,
This is an interesting idea. I think that the big issue is how publishers monetize their online content and RSS feeds. If publushers accept to have their RSS feeds syndicated by commercial web sites and applications (software, intranets...) they should be entitled for some sort of compensation. How much to charge for the service will depend on how much publishers will be prepared to license their RSS feeds for. On this subject <snip> I've noticed that they license the RSS feeds of About.com.
Is it the kind of service you were thinking about?
Regards
Rodolp

[edited by: engine at 6:16 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2006]
[edit reason] No URLs, see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]