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They say it’s ad-free. Is it tracking-free too?
That's what they claim: "It would be private, no shadowy trackers selling your data." On the other hand they bill you based on the percentage of the time you spend on each individual partner site. That seems somewhat contradictory.
I think it's a compelling and feasible solution to the news site monetization problem. It just seems difficult to imagine users flocking to something like this away from ad blockers—which improve daily (and are mostly free).
Every time people say that if they had how to pay for the site they would use it. Now is the time to show the truth
I've been wanting someone to do this idea (spotify for news) for years. But they really need to get one of the heavy hitters with paywalls (NY Times, The Economist, Financial Times, WaPo, or WSJ). But maybe it's worth paying just to show publishers that it's viable. It's a rough chicken/egg problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wanting someone to do this idea (spotify for news) for years. But they really need to get one of the heavy hitters with paywalls (NY Times, The Economist, Financial Times, WaPo, or WSJ). But maybe it's worth paying just to show publishers that it's viable. It's a rough chicken/egg problem.
Blendle has them on a "pay for what you read" basis, that I really like
The problem with Scroll is we trade one evil for another: instead of ads and trackers, we get legally dubious "AS IS" clauses in Terms of Service, and censorship-laden arbitration clauses that cannot be subject to oversight.
Are there any concretely troubling parts to the terms that you saw?
Arbitration agreements trouble me, even though they are pervasive. In particular for a product that is trying to offer a better alternative to opaque tracking and advertising techniques it appears to be another way to hide wrongdoing.
Hope this helps.
They say it’s ad-free. Is it tracking-free too?
That's what they claim: "It would be private, no shadowy trackers selling your data." On the other hand they bill you based on the percentage of the time you spend on each individual partner site. That seems somewhat contradictory.
either way, you're trading the tracking by ad networks for tracking by scroll.
1. It had a very limited number of publications available.
2. You couldn't just read a whole publication. You could only read a selected few articles from each publication. And the curation of those showed clear political bias on the part of the curators.
3. Blendle sends out a weekly newsletter with a list of the stories it thinks are the best. It also presented a clearly one-sided view of the world and the stories available from the Blendle publications, accompanied by a TON of editorializing on the part of the newsletter authors.
Instead, I subscribe to several newspapers both in electronic and dead tree editions. I don't mind paying for news. But I want to make up my own mind about the news, and not be force-fed one ideology by a gatekeeper.
Back on topic: I hope that Scroll does better than Blendle. Looking at its list of publications, I only see two that I would read, and only one regularly. If Scroll expands to more interesting content, I'll get on board.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what they claim: "It would be private, no shadowy trackers selling your data." On the other hand they bill you based on the percentage of the time you spend on each individual partner site. That seems somewhat contradictory.
You could have an open source addon or reader app which provided only that highly aggregated data.
I think it's a compelling and feasible solution to the news site monetization problem. It just seems difficult to imagine users flocking to something like this away from ad blockers—which improve daily (and are mostly free).
There's been a bunch of similar initiatives, albeit more typically aggregating via a single app (Inkl, Pressreader etc). I've tried some in the past because I'd like to pay for news, but consider site subscriptions as deeply hostile to the www per se. But they all end up with the same problem - great early hope of accumulating more sources over time, which then doesn't happen. Standardised micropayments are the obvio…
Apple's added a good number of publications since it launched, and I get more value out of it than I used to. But it's still trying to find its sea legs.