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Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

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Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

#51

Post by JeanMertz »

ersii wrote: post #41
jurre wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We try to sign publishers without any geographical restrictions, but I think it's ultimately up to them.

So that means you'll open up world-wide account creation when you have some non-dutch content available? :-)

We already support world-wide account creation by simply clicking through the "launch" page in the top right corner.

Of course, the site will still show up in Dutch, but there is an "international"[0] section where you can already read The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and soon more.

https://blendle.com/kiosk/internationaal

Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

#53

Post by maze-le »

jurre wrote: post #44
recursify wrote: post #43

Great idea - I'm happy to pay $50-$100 a year on good journalism, I just don't know where I want to spend that money and on what type of articles. The one click pay and refund policy sounds good. Can't wait until you get more North American publications :)

Awesome to hear! :) If you want to stay tuned on when we'll launch in your country you can sign up here: https://launch.blendle.com

yeah, just registered, I hope you will start this service in germany too!

Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

#55

Post by jrnkntl »

haneefmubarak wrote: post #2

Have 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…

Elinea* (also in the Netherlands) offers a Spotify subscription style model for readers (next to a pay-per-article model) but they seem to be more focused on magazines than newspapers. I figure this has to do with the reasoning mentioned by alexandernl.

* http://www.elinea.nl/

Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

#56

Post by jacques_chester »

girvo wrote: post #29
jacques_chester wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I poked around on Google, can't find where I first saw the term.

Many people prefer fixed prices to pay-by-use. Taxis are paid-by-use, but in some cities you can pay a fixed fee to be taken to the airport. Even if people are told and shown that the fixed fee costs more, many will pick it over a regular fare structure because it is fixed.

For the same reason many people pay for phone data they don't need and so on. The value comes from not needing to consider the price once it has been paid.

Some micropayment schemes always had the sense that one was potentially running up a huge bill; Tipjoy had this problem.

Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

#57

Post by JeanMertz »

Plantagehouder wrote: post #54

Many dutch newspapers (nrc,ad,trouw,etc) offer student discounts on their subscriptions. Do you guys have any plans for something similar?

Sorry, no student discounts in our plans right now. But this is a very interesting idea.

You can however couple your existing newspaper subscriptions with Blendle, giving you access to all of their articles in our kiosk.

Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

#58

Post by kriro »

phreeza wrote: post #47
kriro wrote: post #28

The 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.…

Here is an even crazier idea: (micro)pay to cite instead of (micro)pay to read. Just going to put that out there.

That's actually a pretty cool idea. Once there's infrastructure in place, it's easy to enforce, too. Turn in a paper and upon acceptance you are billed for the citations. Money = reputation also kind of works and is a nice incentive to write good papers that get cited often.

[downside is obviously that it kind of also creates an incentive to cite less]

Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

#59

Post by tinco »

Just want to add something to the conversation about The Netherlands. A cool thing about this startup is that one of its founders (alexandernl here on HN) is a celebrity in The Netherlands. I would guess if you'd go to a random Dutch street and show people his picture, 7/10 adults would recognize him. Alexander is a frequent guest who explains tech products at one of the NL's most hot prime time shows, he's basically the person who explains what an iPhone app is to everyone over 30 in the Netherlands (assuming everyone under 30 already knew).

Now The Netherlands isn't such a big place, just 17 million people or so, so in the grand scheme of things this is not so big of a deal. But it's important to note that were Blendle founded in a bigger country this might not have gone as well at all. How would you both get a foothold in the press industry and get major coverage on national TV? Alexander is in exactly the right place and at exactly the right time.

Now they've effectively proven their worth on a reasonably large scale, they've used that cred to break into the NYT and the WSJ. How's that for an awesome business plan? I think it's the best advantage small European countries have. We've got edit: of course, he has an awesome co-founder and technical team as well, you can't be successful without the tech being top notch.

Re: Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

#60

Post by the_ed »

birger wrote: post #4

I'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.

I figure the thing is with Blendle, as with most paywallsystems, is that they actually turn 'micropayments' into larger payments. ie: you don't want to do a bank-transaction every time you hit a paywallbutton, so they make you pay a larger sum and give you credits. (Like other paywall might provide you with a subscription.)

The extra smart thing here being, of course being twofold: First of all, they provide you this service for a myriad of outlets. (Thus limiting the actual transactions (such a hassle!) with your bank even more. And second: they provide a service for newspapers to publicise their print content online.

As far as I'm concerned, the core thing they made is a way of transferring all these 'print' articles to online. A benefit for publishers. This is now slowly shifting towards the 'one stop paywall' core business. One probably couldn't start without the other, but in the end we'll have a completely new thing. (Which I've described in several rants in Dutch.. yadieyada... stuff.)

I tend to pay more for articles these these, although for full disclosure I'd have to say that I work for a media outlet. (And yes' we're in Blendle, and we're not even print! ;) )

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