Blendle ditches pay-per-article service • Hacker News Board

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#41

Post by Freak_NL » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #26

Freak_NL wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would MMS help unless you read Blendle on a smartphone? Hardly anybody uses MMS in the Netherlands in any case (Blendle is Dutch).

I was assuming most people read news on a smartphone. You do have those in NL, don't you ;) As to nobody using MMS, my point was that we've been "educated" (brainwashed) to use HTTP for everything, when MMS and carrier billing actually used to be a decent and widely accepted alternative for distributing digital media with a natural micropayment mechanism. Though Telcos are greedy af and take a hefty markup for carrie…

People read news on whichever device they're using at the moment. MMS would mean you're stuck with content on just your smartphone.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#42

Post by Eridrus » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #12

I'm curious what exactly didn't work out. Maybe it was just the friction of signing up to read a single article? In that case, maybe what would've helped is sending the article anonymously via MMS and use carrier billing? Like 1990s ring tone downloads, though I'm not sure this model would even work today because Google's Stagefreight bug (or was it on purpose to close another channel not benefitting Google?) made te…

I signed up for Blendle, and even went there when I hit a paywall a few times. The problem is that news organizations value their content too highly, probably because they are very concerned about cannibalizing their subscription revenue, and it turns out I was never willing to shell out $0.50+ for an article.

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#43

Post by wdb » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

Freak_NL wrote: post #40

CarbonvanE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I have been using Topics while my dad was subscribed to De Volkskranr you could read articles for the Trouw, de Volkskrant, AD, and Belgium newspapers etc. I thought it was a good deal.

Via my library I can use PressReader which offers a lot of worldwide newspapers for free. The Westminster council has access to it worth to check for yours!!

Re: Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

#44

Post by flas9sd » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #3

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.

publishers probably wouldn't like this feature. There's a dated small js bookmarklet effort (http://ronkeizer.github.io/blendle-bookmarklet/) that apparently still works for the given WSJ example link. Though for my own favourite newspapers there's no identifiable conversion scheme. Blendle maps by the issues date and article page position to the url, while the newspapers cms has arbitrary article ids.