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Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

dutchnews.nl

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Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#31

Post by Doubl »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #27
Doubl wrote: post #23

It was worth a try but I hated the model. I want to pay a Netflix/Spotify ballpark figure per month and be able read all newspapers. Until then I am very happy to pay the €5 a month I currently pay for one good paper (way less than the rate they show on their site btw)

Yeah. I'll happily pay £15-£20 for access to all newspapers. I'm not going to pay any one newspaper for a subscription, because I don't read that many articles from any individual paper.

That's it, exactly. I wouldn't read an American paper too often but I'd like to have the option when there's a big American story. Ditto Australia or even foreign language papers. I'm never going to take out a sub to them but this way they'd make a little from me sometimes.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#33

Post by manigandham »

Nextgrid wrote: post #24
Freak_NL wrote: post #20

Blendle didn't succeed in getting the major national newspapers on board, because providing access to all content would make them a publisher competing directly with each newspaper's own subscriptions. If you consider the price of a full subscription to a quality newspaper, you can see why Blendle would be way too cheap to sustain as a publishing partner; especially with a monthly flat fee. As a reader, I would love…

> If you consider the price of a full subscription to a quality newspaper Newspaper subscription prices are extremely inflated when you compare what they would’ve earning from ads (and they were happy with ads until blockers came around). If they actually priced the subscriptions for the same amount ads would bring them from an average reader (excluding ad blockers) they would be much more affordable. Sadly, just lik…

You're underestimating how much ads pay.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#34

Post by gpvos »

microtonal wrote: post #13
3bodyProblem wrote: post #7

I 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…

I loved the fact that you could buy articles instead of getting another subscription. I disliked the pay per article model, because it reinforces how expensive news articles actually are in the real world (outside ads-sponsored, click bait articles). I also tried their subscription model, but disliked it even more because you could only read the articles that they (or some ML algorithm) selected. It seems that they n…

If I understand correctly, they also offer free newspapers, except for the most recent 7 days. So it's not for you if your job requires you to be up-to-date with most newspapers.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#35

Post by gpvos »

arnvald wrote: post #21
3bodyProblem wrote: post #7

I 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…

The problem with pay-per-article model is that every article you want to read is a separate purchase decision ("do I want to pay for this thing or not?". In order to make 10EUR from one user, they need to decide to buy 40 separate articles and that means deciding 40 times whether to pay for content. Maybe a subscription model based on credits would be better? For 10EUR/m you get 40 credits that you spend on articles,…

Well, in the previous model you had a balance that you could top up, similar to what you describe. Not all articles were the same price though (generally between 20 cents and 1 euro).

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#36

Post by Wehrdo »

arnvald wrote: post #21
3bodyProblem wrote: post #7

I 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…

The problem with pay-per-article model is that every article you want to read is a separate purchase decision ("do I want to pay for this thing or not?". In order to make 10EUR from one user, they need to decide to buy 40 separate articles and that means deciding 40 times whether to pay for content. Maybe a subscription model based on credits would be better? For 10EUR/m you get 40 credits that you spend on articles,…

I used Blendle regularly for a while, and noticed that their painless refund option really mitigated this "decision stress" for me. There were a few articles that just turned out to be garbage click-bait, so at the end of the article I could simply click "refund me", and immediately get refunded for that article. It didn't happen that frequently, but knowing it was an option made the decision to buy seem less final.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#37

Post by gpvos »

What I'd like is unlimited access to my main newspaper, plus a fairly high but limited number of articles in all other newspapers and magazines (say 100 articles per month, spread over all other publications), maybe with the possibility to carry over unused credits for a few months. A digital subscription to my current newspaper is almost 30 EUR a month. I think this should be doable for the same price, assuming that people who read other papers will occasionally read something from my paper, and money is distributed according to popularity (apart from a base payment to one's main paper). It should be possible to get newspapers to cooperate to do this, possibly through something like Blendle.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#38

Post by Tobias42 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #10

I'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 cour…

The article didn't say that they sold 100000 articles, but that they have 100000 users that payed for individual articles. We don't know how many articles those users bought on average, but probably much more than one.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#39

Post by flas9sd »

A successful Blendle gives the reader independence and absolves the user of getting intimate with all the digital sales strategies at publishers. Pocket does not position itself as distributor, so I welcome Blendle as broker. They offer fulltext export to Pocket. The web based reading experience of Blendle is also solid. Though I like pay-per-article, publishers and Blendle themselves seem to disagree on its profitability.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#40

Post by Freak_NL »

CarbonvanE wrote: post #30
Freak_NL wrote: post #20

Blendle didn't succeed in getting the major national newspapers on board, because providing access to all content would make them a publisher competing directly with each newspaper's own subscriptions. If you consider the price of a full subscription to a quality newspaper, you can see why Blendle would be way too cheap to sustain as a publishing partner; especially with a monthly flat fee. As a reader, I would love…

How did you come to the conclusion that Blendle didn't get the major national newspapers on board? In the old model every single major newspapers was since the start on board and only the NRC left in 2016. With Premium all major newspapers except NRC and de Telegraaf are on board. So practically every newspaper in the Netherlands is on board with both the micro-payment the subscription model. (disclosure: I work part…

> How did you come to the conclusion that Blendle didn't get the major national newspapers on board?

You're not carrying NRC. Any serious collection of Dutch quality newspapers includes at least all three of Volkskrant, Trouw, and NRC. The rest is regional, tabloid (Telegraaf), or mostly irrelevant (AD).

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