I can't find the subscription costs. How did you manage to get the papers to sign?
I've been expecting for a service like yours for some time, but here in Spain the news papers are too dumb to try something like this (unless all the other big ones have done it first) you only have to look at the Google law, they are desperate and lost.
You sign up, and only pay for what you read. Articles cost €0,30 on average, with smaller news-type articles being cheaper than longreads (interviews, opinion pieces, backstory articles).
On signup you get €2,50 for free, and then another €2,50 when you topup your wallet the first time.
Regarding signing up the publishers. This took a long time in The Netherlands, but getting an investment from The New York Times and Axel Springer certainly helped speed up the German launch.
I hope your model works as an antidote to the perverse incentives of ad-based revenue, but I wonder if you could improve the incentives even more. There will still be advantages to using click-bait and writing that manipulates our curiosity. If you make it trivial to get a refund, that will greatly negate those incentives, but it also enables freeloaders, no?
In fact, refunds have proven to be a great way to combat click-bait links. The example we've given before is gossip magazines, which thrive on click-bait (purchase-bait?) titles on their front covers.
In Blendle, we see a high refund rate on these types of magazine articles, when the title suggests something else than the article presents to the reader.
Freeloaders have turned out to be only a minor issue, whom we are willing to live with, if it means we have a great user experience for 99% of the other people using Blendle in good faith. We're of course thinking of ways to tackle this as well, but never at the cost of user experience.
RE: Being asked whether or not I want to spend $0.25 or $0.50 twenty or fifty times a day is not an appealing prospect.
I agree, this is indeed something we work to improve every day. The two biggest features to combat this are refunds and low-friction purchases. The latter we implement by not requiring any action except for clicking on the text you want to read.
I really like the ability to pay instead of getting ads. However, my big opposition to Blendle is that it breaks the web. How do you guys feel about this?
I really want this in the us. I use adblock and will never shut it off. Also something like this would give me a real incentive to finish reading an article since "I paid for it after all."
We're already got The Washington Post, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and soon The New York Times in our kiosk. The interface is still in Dutch (for now), but it's a start:
That's great. Will this work such that if I see an article on HN I can somehow use your service seamlessly? I'd rather get my news from HN (what I do now) than visiting a different aggregator site.
We've recently launched our "Pay with Blendle" micropayments button on a Dutch publisher's site[0] which allows you to read the article on the publisher's site, but pay using your Blendle wallet, using the same principles (pay-per-article, one-click-refunds, seamless UX).
No, you pay per article OR you buy the whole newspaper/issue.
In fact, if you pay for separate articles in a newspaper and we notice the accumulative total is more than the price of the issue, you automatically get free access to the rest of that issue.
As far as I know, Piano Platform works well in various countries in Europe. I wonder how does Blendle compare to Piano, from user's and publisher's perspective.
We don't like popups and ads either, so you most certainly won't find them on our website. You only pay for what you want, and can always refund with a single click.
We have a good privacy policy, here's the (loosely translated, this is not the official translation) first paragraph:
Blendle takes your privacy very seriously and will store and use your
information in a safe and secure way. Publishers have a tendency to demand that
we give them the email addresses of everyone who reads their articles, but we
refuse to give in to these requests. Also, we don't do ads, so we have no
incentive to collect data to sell you relevant ads.
This is really problematic, IMO. The idea of paying only for what you like, rather than what you read. People will inevitably end up "voting", as it were, only for stories that line up with their biases.
I deeply agree that human bias is a problem in general, but I prefer the reader's bias for the content over the bias of the advertiser or the reader's bias for click-bait. Do you prefer the current world where clicks, click-bait and other manipulations determine money flows?
The grossly perverted incentives of the ad-driven web aside, is what people read today less subject to bias? People choose, for example, to read/watch the NY Times vs WSJ, Politico vs Drudge Report, or MSNBC vs Fox News based on which publications line up with their biases.
If I don't get to decide whether my reading choices are due to my biases or my ability to discern quality or truth, who does? You? Google? Huff Post? HN's ranking algorithm X the aggregate mindset of HN readers? None of these are biased?
People voting with their wallets is the bedrock of the free market, which despite its shortcomings is vastly better than an economy driven by clicks and the manipukation thereof, and driven by advertisers and their agendas.
I come across some well done (by some objective measure: good references, background checks), long form investigative piece. It seems interesting, so I read it, but then find that it clashes with some deeply held belief of mine. I decide at that point that I want my money back, because whatever it is I read made me uncomfortable, or I just didn't like it. What this ends up incentivizing is journalism that merely echoes the beliefs of your target demographic, dressed in beautiful language.
My problem is with the money back feature, not the entire idea of it. I think some other measure of engagement e.g. how much time one spends on an article, whether one keeps going back to a particular passage over and over, should be what determines if the publisher gets paid. Not whether the reader "likes" it.
One way we try to solve this is that you can refund "no questions asked" for the first ~20 seconds or so (since you probably weren't able to read the article past the first paragraph, and maybe accidentally clicked).
After those 20 seconds, you can still refund for 24h, but you get asked a single question: "Why do you want a refund?", with a couple of reasons (too short, too pricy, unreadable, not what I expected, ...) and a freeform option to give your own reason for the refund.
This is a metric we do pass on to the publishers, so they know why people refund certain articles. There is more we can do to understand refund-reasons better, but it's a start.
I think it evens out. Most people are pretty open to reasonable, objective expository writing. There are fringes that will dislike anything that challenges their beliefs.
Also I assume that opinion and advocacy pieces are clearly distinguished from straight news? Just because something is on the front page of the NYT or WSJ doesn't mean the writer doesn't have an agenda.
This one of the problems the internet brings as a pull mechanism. The great thing about Blendle is that younger people actually pay for content and have the possibility to read articles from multiple outlets (which is better imo than only reading only single newspaper)
There's some rough numbers in this [0] article that don't disagree with you, but do assert that this can be a metric for quality. Average refunds are 5% of readers of a given article, but gossip articles can go up to 50%.
I did not vote you down but I would guess you got downvotes because in my opinion your concerns are overstated. Not impossible but just overstated. Further it's fine if people disagree and get refunds, the majority won't because I feel like the majority of self educating readers enjoy a bit of objectivity.
People tend to downvote if they don't care to reply. Me personally, I upvote most people that reply to me even if I disagree as I feel we should encourage discussion and alternate opinions.
