Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
dutchnews.nl
Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#2From now on you'll have to pay 10eur a month to access a small selection of old papers (i.e. not today's) and some magazines. Too much for too little, I feel.
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#3I was surprised, when I tried Blendle, that there wasn’t an easy way to jump from a free article on a newspaper’s website to the paid version on Blendle.
Instead, if I followed a free or paywalled link on HN, I had to copy the title and search on blendle’s website. Not the most frictionless way to make authors get paid.
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#4I was surprised, when I tried Blendle, that there wasn’t an easy way to jump from a free article on a newspaper’s website to the paid version on Blendle. Instead, if I followed a free or paywalled link on HN, I had to copy the title and search on blendle’s website. Not the most frictionless way to make authors get paid.
> I was surprised, when I tried Blendle, that there wasn’t an easy way to jump from a free article on a newspaper’s website to the paid version on Blendle.
> Instead, if I followed a free or paywalled link on HN, I had to copy the title and search on blendle’s website. Not the most frictionless way to make authors get paid.
Would have made a great browser extension.
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#5From now on you'll have to pay 10eur a month to access a small selection of old papers (i.e. not today's) and some magazines. Too much for too little, I feel.
AFAICT, you can still read today's news, but the major difference being not being able anymore to browse through magazines and newspapers, but their team and algorithms determining what will be highlighted. I feel this is a major step back on an Internet that is already redacted enough on multiple feeds/timelines.
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#6As I’ve found out; people say they want to pay per article for content, but they much prefer free in reality.
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#7I think a 10 euro subscription service is a lazy business model, only one worse is everything based on ad revenue. I loved the fact that you could buy articles instead of getting another subscription.
I tried to buy an article last year, I'm not 100% sure why, but I never succeed in reading the article that I wanted to read. I just wanted to pay like 10 euro's until i needed to pay the next 10. But they were already forcing you into a monthly subscription model.
Now they are just the dutch version of apple news, seems like a terrible spot to be in.
I didn't try the audio stuff yet, that might be interesting. I enjoyed the audio stuff from Audm, but I thought it was expensive to get a subscription. Also to much competition in the podcast space.
I think https://thecorrespondent.com/ is doing a better job at changing the world. It's clearer what you get for your money, and you actually feel like your supporting journalism. Not sure if I feel the same way about Blendle.
That said, i know some people who use it, but mostly because their jobs requires them to be up to date with most newspapers.
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#8I think a 10 euro subscription service is a lazy business model, only one worse is everything based on ad revenue. I loved the fact that you could buy articles instead of getting another subscription. I tried to buy an article last year, I'm not 100% sure why, but I never succeed in reading the article that I wanted to read. I just wanted to pay like 10 euro's until i needed to pay the next 10. But they were already…
Maybe they should’ve done a token system so you can sub to some and/or use a fixed amount of tokens for individual articles. Plus you can stock up on tokens or buy them in bulk when you run out.
Then they could do a reward system for referrals and other interactions to get free tokens.
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#9Honestly I believe people, in general, just don't care about what the read online.
The reality is that either you believe at everything you read online or you understand that the world is so complex that it is too difficult to explain it in few capitols.
The reasonable middle ground of in deep reportages is disappearing because too complex anyway to be discussed with the "general public".
I wonder if it is possible to make people want to subscribe to in-deep articles with advertis, something in the line of: "The informed executive reads Blendle" (or something along the line) so that people who don't read Blendle are automatically considered morons or uniformed.
Is more a marketing stunt but it may be interested.
Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service
#10I've been following them for as long as they've existed. Their business model with per article payments never made sense to me. And those 100K articles that they sold is a clear indication that this is not working. That's not users but articles sold for something like 25 cents. 25K in revenue in other words. That's nothing and they
ve been citing the same number for years.
60K subscriptions is not nothing but of course not a lot of revenue either; though 600K/month does sound it should be able to sustain a small company and if you can grow that it can actually turn into substantial revenue. Of course, like with Spotify, a lot would flow directly to the publishers.
Blendle has always danced around the one thing they can't deliver which is a subscription service that offers access to all/most relevant news articles currently locked behind paywalls of the few surviving news papers that struggle to make money this way (most of them are failing or just getting by).
The likes of the New York times seem to be doing ok-ish because they are big enough to still be able to produce quality news and have a large number of subscribers. Most of the rest has given up on the notion entirely by either focusing on dwindling paper sales, or ad driven news on web sites, or like the Guardian calling for donations. It's a race to the bottom.
So, I hope they succeed but I'm pessimistic about their chances. This doesn't sound like a winning formula.