Why do startups keep thinking micropayments is a thing people want?
Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#22Why do startups keep thinking micropayments is a thing people want?
Because people (with money to spend on journalism) want a way to pay for just the articles they like.
Note that these microtransactions are where you pay a small amount of money for a small amoint of content. They aren't the burger joint model of MMO DLC where you get the buns as part of the original game, with cheese, burger, salad and condiments as microtransaction downloads.
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#23Why do startups keep thinking micropayments is a thing people want?
Because people consume a lot of little things. Ads are essentially involuntary micro-payments. It's a way of aligning the interests of content-creators and with their users rather than their sponsors. What's wrong with micro-payments?
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#24I'm one of the 'didn't pay for newspapers before' and right now spend a couple of euro's a month on Blendle. Articles cost between € 0,10, and € 0,50. If you buy so much articles from one paper / magazine that it is cheaper to get the whole edition, you get the whole edition. Refund work perfect. You don't like the article -> click -> money back. No questions asked.
You don't like the article -> click -> money back. No questions asked. That right there might be the most revolutionary part of their approach to online micro payments. You could apply it to so much.
It's also something we are very proud of.
It turns out, if you give people the opportunity to read in an elegant and easy way, and provide articles written by great journalists, the refund ratio stays very low (avarage of 5%).
Of course, the flip side of that (as the article mentions) is that click-baity articles tend to get a high refund ratio (sometimes up to 50%). But such a "negative" result might actually be a net-positive for journalism in general.
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#25Why do startups keep thinking micropayments is a thing people want?
You just read an article about them being successful, and some of the innovations they used, did you actually read it?
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#26This is very very beautiful. As a owner of an Auto Industry Magazine in Pakistan. I would love this, since my magazine subscriptions are going down.
And my site isn't generating money.
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#27Really cool! As a dutch student (econometrie) I do not / didn't know that anyone used this. Kind of silly since it was right under my nose.
Very awesome :) if you guys need a werkstudent as a financial analyst or just a quantitative guy who likes to play with code and excel sheets ;)
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#28The model seems to work and they seem to have great traction. I can see all the objections but the proof is in the pudding.
Really liked this sentence from their answer to a critic:
"""You said you talked about the idea of Blendle when I was two years old. But Blendle is not an “idea”. Blendle is about execution. And because of that we’ve gathered more than 140.000 users in The Netherlands with a $0 marketing budget."""
Seems somewhat reasonable to assume this could be transfered to the hyperbroken academic publishing model (publisher resistence is a lot higher and older articles are worth more than for typical newspaper stuff though). One source, micropayment per article, refund policy. One can dream ;)
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#29Have you guys considered a Spotify style subscription model? Say, where I as a reader would pay a fixed monthly fee but would then be able to read as many articles as I wanted from the various sources you guys support throughout the month? Of course, the fees would be split across the publishers proportional to the time or number of articles I read from each. If you have, what were some of the pros and cons you saw i…
> Of course, the fees would be split across the publishers proportional to the time or number of articles I read from each. This has been tried several times without success (Kachingle, Contenture, Readability), possibly because it was all being done on the open web or through proxies, for too little money. The main problem is that tracking visits on the open web is unreliable with the current approaches. Blendle arr…
> taxi fare problem
Do you mind expanding on that?
Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't like the article -> click -> money back. No questions asked. That right there might be the most revolutionary part of their approach to online micro payments. You could apply it to so much.
It's also something we are very proud of. It turns out, if you give people the opportunity to read in an elegant and easy way, and provide articles written by great journalists, the refund ratio stays very low (avarage of 5%). Of course, the flip side of that (as the article mentions) is that click-baity articles tend to get a high refund ratio (sometimes up to 50%). But such a "negative" result might actually be a n…
This data is also extremly valuable for journalists. I can envision someone becoming a better journalist by optimizing for lower refunds. A good journalist will use this as a weapon. Quite often you can't really be sure about the quality of your piece. Now you have an interesting data point.