RSS made content portable. It never made it payable. And the dominant "reader" is increasingly an AI agent: it pulls a feed, uses the author's words to answer someone's question, and sends back no click, no view, no cent. The author funded the work; the agent captured the value.

There's already a precedent for fixing this in the feed layer: Podcasting 2.0's <podcast:value> lets a podcast declare a payout destination so apps can stream micropayments to the creator. It works, it's adopted, and it's just a namespaced element in the feed.

Proposal: generalize that to any RSS/Atom feed — an optional payout address a feed can advertise, so an AI that cites the content can pay the author a micropayment, weighted by how much the source actually contributed to the answer.

Two things make this realistic with RSSHub specifically:

• No breaking change. Opt-in. The payout can live as an optional namespaced element, or in a sidecar registry keyed by feed URL — feeds without one behave exactly as today.
• The rail exists. Pay-per-request over x402 with stablecoin (USDC) settles sub-cent micropayments today — the regime "per citation" actually needs. (Podcasting 2.0 uses Lightning; same shape, different rail.)

Reference implementation: I built Keryx (open source) to prove the loop end-to-end — an agent that decides which sources are worth reading, reads enough to answer, writes a cited answer, then settles a per-citation micropayment to each source it actually cited (multi-author works split automatically). It already consumes RSSHub-style feeds unmodified; the only thing missing from the standard is a place for the author to say "pay me here." (Settlement is on a testnet rail today.)

The ask: would the maintainers/community be open to an optional payout convention at the feed level? I'd be happy to open a PR. Two open questions:

1. Extend an existing convention (a <podcast:value>-style namespaced element) vs. a lightweight RSSHub-native config field?
2. Sidecar registry (keyed by feed URL, zero feed changes) vs. inline element?

Curious what shape you'd actually merge.