Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by the_ed » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 12:04 PM UTC

kriro wrote: post #30

JeanMertz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed.

If Blendle continues to be successful this could get very interesting though. As described in the article linked here, it's a great metric. And their publishers will also start to use their metric. So -while they now describe the Blendle-revenue as an extra- this will actually change the way we deal with the 'print' data which is now accessible online, creating a new dynamic. This will surely have an impact on the print version of these magazines as well, I can imagine, making Blendle a content driver(shaper?) and not 'just' a source of 'extra revenue' as they tend to see it now.

If it all takes off impact will, imho, be different than we can probably predict now, even though we can make some estimates of possible directions. Some people will be happier with the results after -say- five years than others. Time will tell.

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

#62

Post by alper » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 12:17 PM UTC

This might be one of the cases where being in a small country is useful. You can get significant coverage to validate a model quickly before exporting it internationally.

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

#63

Post by reitanqild » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

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…

One disadvantage to this that I hven't seen anyone else mention is the Netflix problem:

Once the service becomes popular a lot of people at big publishers will come up with the "brilliant" idea of creating their own "Netflix" which will cost slightly more and only contain their content and all of a sudden you have to subscribe to two places if you want to enjoy movies/series without using popcorn time.

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

#64

Post by willlma » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

hobs wrote: post #33

willlma wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What's wrong with micro-payments? Nothing inherently, its just that they are generally used to extract more revenue from the existing model instead of supplant existing incomes. There have been several studies about decision making being taxing the brain, and always being presented with a dollar sign for any part of your experience can be a bit wearing. If your domicile had the ability to charge every time you go t…

> they are generally used to extract more revenue from the existing model instead of supplant existing incomes

Blendle is doing the latter and I would only argue for micro-payments in this context.

> If your domicile had the ability to charge every time you go to the restroom, I guarantee they would just raise the rates

Going to the bathroom is something you need to do, not something you choose to do, and the friction of finding another bathroom every time you want to is quite high. Reading articles is by no means a need and free alternatives are a button tap away. You're comparing one of the most demand inelastic services with an incredibly elastic one. They will never be able to extract unfair prices because readers will simply stop reading.

So I agree that micro-payments have their place, and that place is the digital world where we consume many small things that we could do without if we thought that they were too expensive. The world that most of HN lives and breathes. But to write off micro-payments entirely is short-sighted.

As for your original question, the reason a lot of people think that micro-payments are something that people want is probably because of Jaron Lanier's book, Who Owns the Future. It's a good read.