Pay-Per-Story Platform Blendle Goes Live in Germany

https://medium.com/on-blendle/pay-per-story-platform-blendle-goes-live-in-germany-37b53dbf360b

by JeanMertz • 11 years ago

75 32 11 years ago

bitJericho3• 11 years ago

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."

JeanMertz7• 11 years ago

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:

https://blendle.com/kiosk/engels

Also, be sure to sign up at https://launch.blendle.com, we're working hard to get this across the Atlantic, stay tuned!

bitJericho3• 11 years ago

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.

imaginenore• 11 years ago

But you can't pay per-article, you have to buy the whole newspaper.

okal4• 11 years ago

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.

bebna• 11 years ago

Their already do, or Bild wouldn't be that successful.

eevilspock2• 11 years ago

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.

okal4• 11 years ago

Let me construct a scenario:

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.

throwaway049• 11 years ago

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%.

[0] https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...

okal4• 11 years ago

Thank you. The numbers were a pleasant surprise.

ams61102• 11 years ago

Seems to follow how upvoting works here.

KJasper• 11 years ago

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)

okal4• 11 years ago

Not that it matters greatly, but did I say something incorrect/untrue/horribly offensive? I don't get the downvotes.

bitJericho3• 11 years ago

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.

forcer• 11 years ago

I love the concept. I hope the execution will be right. e.g. if I pay for Economist story, I won't be bombarded with their popups.

JeanMertz7• 11 years ago

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.

peteretep• 11 years ago

Cannot wait until you launch this in the UK. The email alerting doesn't seem to let me tell you what country I'm in...

mightymaike• 11 years ago

I wonder if they analyse your reading habbits and sell this to third party's.

mverwijs• 11 years ago

We make money by selling articles to you. Not by selling your data to someone else.

omegant• 11 years ago

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.

JeanMertz7• 11 years ago

There are no subscriptions.

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.

eevilspock2• 11 years ago

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?

Jean, I would love to hear your or Blendle's thoughs on my variation of a reader payment scheme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960

emir_• 11 years ago

30 cents per article?

polskibus• 11 years ago

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.

sharpercoder2• 11 years ago

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?

an_ko• 11 years ago

What do you mean by "break the web" here?

I've seen the phrase used to criticise lots of things, e.g.: SOPA/PIPA, mobile-hostile CSS, semantically incorrect HTTP codes.

sharpercoder2• 11 years ago

Linking to an article does not result in a guaranteed full information access. I am never sure the receiving party is able to read the information.

Pay-Per-Story Platform Blendle Goes Live in Germany

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