“Techmeme” Monthly Printed Magazine [opportunity]
By Steve Poland • January 30, 2008
Allen Stern asks if people would pay $1 per month for full RSS feeds with no ads. He poses this question to spur some conversation on how as a professional blogger he could be making some more money. While it seems like people would be inclined to pay $1 for some reading material, I don’t see it happening with RSS feeds anytime soon. People are happy with their RSS readers, and the ads at the bottom aren’t intrusive.
But I’ve got another idea that might work — basically repackaging the writings from his blog (and other blogs that participate) into a hard copy magazine form. People still like hard copies of things– magazines, books, etc — good material for the bathroom, airplane, waiting room, etc.
What I’d really like to see is a weekly (or monthly) magazine that is selective in the writings that it publishes (the best blog posts and tech news of the week/month) and also selectively publishes some comments from the post (and/or comments from other blog posts related to that post).
This would give people a hard copy, but also would ensure they didn’t miss something for the week/month.
If you were selling these monthly for $5/mo, I bet you could sell 10k/month. At even a 40% margin, that’s $20k/mo profit. Allen, start the coalition of bloggers that will give you republish print rights, and hop to it! 
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