It is an interesting idea and I look forward to see how this will turn out. I just explored it a bit and so far the implementation seems solid. However, I reckon that I will probably loose interest very soon because the more I ask myself: "Is this really worht xx cent?" the more I will conclude that reading most articles is just a waste of time.
I think it will take some time to figure out what kind of articles and which audience this platform is actually for.
My hope is that it will find a way to make labor/ cost intense journalism more economically viable and thus promote it but as of now magazines publish too many low effort pieces. An extreme example: the WSJ's "Habbits of highly productive people" costs 39 cents. I read it and if anything somebody should pay ME 39 cents for wasting my time. ;)
The article price points are always so bizarre. The whole paper is $1.50 or $2 and they want 40c for 1 article?
This is an extremely difficult nut to crack but Blendle's is the best approach I have seen so far.
I think success will rely upon brand name content, a good preview so buyers know what they're getting, the auto-refund thing and 10-50c pricing per article.
Blendle's founder here. Pricing is something that we're going to experiment with. Nobody knows what the willingness to pay for journalism, yet. So we're going to figure that out.
I think it'll always be a mix between micropayments and subscriptions: micropayments if you only read a little, subscriptions if you read a lot from a specific title.
I don't think people should pay for journalism. They should pay for journalists.
What do I mean?
The benefits that we get from journalism are maximized if we have expert journalists – people who dedicate their lives to being good journalists.
Good journalists need stability. If they depend on the readership rates for individual articles, they are disencentivized to take the kinds of risks that a stable institution can afford to give them.
I don't know Blendle's long term plans in terms of supporting quality journalism – but the micropayment model is at odds with giving stability to individual journalists.
Hopefully this is something your are thinking about. How can we best support journalists – and not just individual peices of journalism?
This is the sort of thing someone like Blendle could choose to do. After all, just because content is payed by the piece doesn't mean content creators must be.
This makes sense. What you get with most magazines/newspapers works as a bundling discount, basically.
Let's say you buy an issue of the NYT. Are you actually going to read every bit of it, or are you going to focus on the articles that particularly interest you, skim the headlines for sections that are less important, and so on? If you only have to pay for what you read, suddenly the paper is making a lot less money.
Most popular media out there that people want you to pay money for is simply not of any value to modern consumers, you can easily do without it and you are not rewarded for reading it in any way more than reading any of the other stuff available for free.
"Our editors and algorithms help you find the best stuff."
I already have three sets of editors and two algorithms for finding more stuff than I could ever care to read: they're called "Facebook", "Twitter", and "Hacker News".
So their curation piece isn't interesting to me at all; only the payments.
Put another way, the web has thoroughly solved the problem of "show me some stuff that I want to read right now" -- it's like trying to drink from a firehose. There is no need for another player in that already crowded game.
Where the web is failing is at funding all this stuff.
I imagine that the answer for this is easy, though: a "read it on blendle" button for whatever article you clicked through to from FB, Twitter, or HN.
Good point. Our current "onboarding process" for publishers is a bit too heavy-weight to allow "just anyone" – even you ;-) to join Blendle right now.
This is definitely something we're investigating though. And in The Netherlands, there's already a collective of journalists who created a non-profit umbrella organisation to represent freelance writers, who have been onboarded into our system.
Also, the Blendle Button that I linked to above is it's own product, with a much less heavy-weight onboarding setup. We've already seen great success using the button on a German site like http://uebermedien.de/abo/ (in this case, a flat-fee subscription button). So that's definitely something we'd like to roll out to as much freelance publishers as possible.
Excellent concept, and one I've been a proponent of for a while.
I'd like it to have an option (which it may have but I haven't found) to either not show me stuff I already subscribe to (WSJ, Economist, NYT) or allow me to enter subscription information so that I would not double pay.
From a consumption point of view there should be a "blendie link" which is like a URL shortner for articles which connects you through the paywall to the Blendie version of an article. Then if you share that link it lets other Blendie subscribers read it in a fairly frictionless way.
Blendle founder here. It's exactly what we're working on (making articles for free on Blendle if you already have a subscription), and are already doing ("blendle links") :)
Awesome, I look forward to you becoming the "Google Reader" of pay-walled content. :-) It has always been a challenge for me that I would be happy to pay for an article but rarely want to commit to a monthly fee without knowing if I'll use it enough to make it worthwhile. I really love that you guys have taken this sort of thing and shipped product.
I have privacy concerns with this type of service, especially if it catches up. I don't want a third party to know what i m reading. Besides i think this kind of service would be best implemented at the browser level. An insert-bitcoin-to-read button would be a great experiment worth giving a try in firefox.
Maybe a browser plugin that makes an instant micropayment when you load the article? Of course after after obtaining your permission?
I tried to define a spec for something like this:
It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable, there has to be some credit card option. Given that a $0.20 credit card transaction doesn't make financial sense, you need someone to handle micro-payments, and who's that going to be? PayPal?
We've been needing a micro payment standard since 2000, and one has yet to materialize.
> We've been needing a micro payment standard since 2000, and one has yet to materialize.
Apple, Google, Steam, Sony (PS4 store) and others all have micro-transactions solved for their purposes (with credit cards, prepaid options and user "wallets"). So this isn't likely to really be an obstacle for Blendle.
> It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable
Why does that prevent it? Just exchange it immediately via an automated service (look at BitPay for an example), they take the minute to minute risk for 1% profit and you don't have to worry about it.
>Why does that prevent it?
Because I would need to buy my Bitcoin in "bulk" and the publishers would need to set their price in USD, EUR, GBP or whatever, in order to be able to do proper financial planning.
Given that Bitcoin is as stable as say the USD, someone is going to win or lose money on the conversion between "real" currencies and Bitcoin. I won't be risking money becoming worth less, and neither are the publisher.
I don't know BitPay, but I don't assume that they the risk of devaluation of my Bitcoin for weeks or months. We're not talking about buying just the amount of Bitcoins I need for one article, say 20 cent, because fees attached to the credit card transaction your will want to buy at least a little more.
Agreeable there is a point to be made in the fact that the price of each article is so low that you would only need to buy something like $5 worth of Bitcoin, and at that point it doesn't really matter if you lose %20.
Still I don't feel like Bitcoin is the right option, but maybe it could be the backend to a micro payment system. I just don't want to deal with the Bitcoins or conversion to my local currency.
It's pretty stable for the short time it takes for the payment transaction. It's crucial for having a certain level of anonymity. Besides, i can imagine there should be wallets that keep your money in USD or euro, and convert to bitcoin only when needed (edit: someone mentioned it: BitPay).
> It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable, there has to be some credit card option.
Perhaps not using purely bitcoin, but using it as a medium of exchange still makes sense with a volatile currency. As long as bitcoin is converted to/from a fiat currency within a short time period the risk of value fluctuations is pretty low.
This is the approach that coinetize (https://www.coinetize.com/) seems to be taking. They take bitcoin (among other payment methods), and convert it into credits which are valued at fractions of a dollar, and pay out bitcoin to the journalist when these credits are spent to access a page.
The transactional cost for bitcoin is too large to make 1:1 btc micro payments work right now.
Each of those transactions costs money. In the end Bitcoin can't do 25c transactions at any real scale. You have some token* backed up by bitcoin, but at that point you might as well just use Money.
You could even pretend the tokens where bitcoins, but individual 25c transactions are not going to show up on the block chain.
PS: Dogecoin can handle ~10x as many transactions as bitcoin so it might work better for this. But, even then you can't have millions of people doing several transactions per day.
If Bitcoin ever gets Lightning implemented, this could be a good use for it. Something similar already works as an Ethereum contract [0]; EtherAPIs is using it for micropayments on API calls over HTTP. [1]
They exist but there's no single place like a PayPal or a Google wallet. Until then a service which consolidates them so you have to only make 1 sensible payment per month might be a workaround.
I guess my biggest question as a journalist is not, "what is the point of blendle?", but rather, "what is the point of the NYT, Times, etc.?"
I'd be happy to just publish directly onto their platform and let readers pay me directly for the stuff of mine that they want to read via blendle (vs. paying a publication via blendle, then the publication pays me).
Nuance and variety. A (quality) newspaper has its own signature, and presents you with a variety of articles (including news, investigative journalism, and op/ed articles). Some of these will be very popular, some of these will only interest a subset of the readers. Sometimes an article about something completely unfamiliar to you will turn out quite interesting. That is the serendipitous effect you get with a newspaper — although you do apply some form of filter by choosing newspaper X over newspaper Y.
If only economic concerns where a factor in determining what to write about, you would end up with a few insightful articles about widely appealing topics widely shared, but fewer high quality articles about niche topics.
A newspaper for me is a convenient shorthand for “a group of journalists and columnists who write good quality articles”. I would hate to have to hunt down individual articles and authors! The risk of getting locked up in my own private filter bubble is way too high.
I have a subscription to a newspaper I read daily, but sometimes I want to read an article from another (Dutch) newspaper. That is when Blendle is really useful (Blendle is a Dutch company, and all major Dutch newspapers make their articles available there).
The situation may be bleaker in the US. I am not overly familiar with US newspapers.
Posted above by JeanMertz - "... in The Netherlands, there's already a collective of journalists who created a non-profit umbrella organisation to represent freelance writers, who have been onboarded into our system."
The number of people in the NY media establishment getting paid a reasonable wage to write stuff that people aren't reading is a few orders of magnitude smaller than it was even five years ago, and in another five years it will be zero.
Uh no. While revenues and thus hiring have certainly dropped, it is by no means on a few orders of magnitude. I'd be surprised if it were even on a single order of magnitude. Even the newspaper I worked at that is in much more dire straights compared to 10 years ago is about a third its size.
Besides new online outlets, legacy companies are still chugging along. Starting wage for a reporter at the New York Times is around $70K last I heard (too lazy to look up the union site)
I think you misread my comment. I wasn't saying that the entire NY media establishment is approaching zero employees. I was strictly speaking of the classic "guy who gets paid to write stuff that nobody reads because it's good for the community/country/brand/whatever, while people on some other beat bring in the eyeballs and pay the bills." That's the population that's shrinking really fast.
I can get to the password creation stage fine, then it says.
> An error occurred. We're as baffled as you are. Would you try again later?
EDIT: Apparently you need scripts enabled from connect.facebook.net enabled to get past the password creation screen. Is this intentional for some reason? Or just a bug? (I would assume the second, seeing the next screen is the optional connect your facebook or twitter account page.)
I've been testing this for the last few days and am curating the technology section. Not paid, just volunteering, and I really like it so far. Great design, easy to jump into articles and frictionless paying is refreshing. Not a fan of the left-to-right scrolling, but otherwise it's likely going to be a boon for news companies who need the money.
My initial impression is similar. The site is well designed and easy to use, full screen and mobile, and the initial selection of reading material is encouraging.
Only major pain point is the side scrolling, newspaper column format in the article view. I strongly prefer the vertical layout the rest of the internet currently uses.
This applies somewhat to the news feed as well. It feels like it's trying to replicate a physical news stand, throwing away the lessons learned from Google Reader and Facebook style feeds.
I think the most important thing with this company is not the UI or the onboarding or the way they distribute the money -- it's the fact that they got the approval of the content creators first and then went and started the beta.
Having the NYT, Newsweek, WaPo, WSJ, Businessweek, etc. on board shows that people can comfortable give them their money and know that it will actually be going to content creators. In far too many of these type of sites, the vast majority of the money doesn't actually go to content creators.
I'm really excited to see Blendle opening their doors to the English speaking market.
Journalism funded by advertising contains several seemingly-unpatchable incentive structures... (a) the need to promote the advertising to you, breaking the concentration you need to read the article... (b) the fact that getting you far enough to see the adverts is enough to earn revenue so the content quality can be a secondary priority... (c) the fact that some sites go as far as mixing journalist-written content with PR-written content so you can't always tell the difference immediately.
Yes, there are bound to be some UX hurdles, some promises and hand-holding around privacy, some exploration of subscription or micropayments... but fundamentally this is a better model as it fixes all of the broken incentives without (as far as I can see) creating any new ones.
I signed up for the US launch a while ago because I believe in this model, but I have heard nothing from them since, so my email is already in their database, so they won't give me "Instant access only today for Hacker News readers."
That's really not the issue. Yes, I immediately used an email alias to bypass it, but that doesn't stop it from being a common and annoying issue with these types of access programs. I think of it the same way as people who kickstarted a product being told they're not getting access until a bunch of other people that signed up after it was fully funded.
They seem to be filtering certain email providers. I tried to sign up with sneakemail (a paid email service) and the reg system told me "Please sign up with your personal email address." - when I entered a password. :-(
Is there any way to read the articles not in a horizontal layout? Everything about the site implementation is slick except for that part. It's incredibly difficult and awkward to read, to be honest.
Really curious as to where this may go. On the one hand, I'm skeptical. It feels like there's simply too much friction for a commodity. And doing relatively well in the Dutch market is one thing. Being able to translate this to the English market is, of course, a different story entirely. On the other hand, being able to read individual articles from most of the major publications in one centralized environment is super compelling to me.
Additionally, I feel like the iTunes comparison that's often made isn't entirely fair. Before iTunes, I believe there simply wasn't any viable (non-illegal) alternative to get an individual song. Whereas Blendle competes with, as mentioned before, loads of other free alternatives online. I'm sure this is appealing to a core group of fairly voracious readers, but wonder if it extrapolates to the wider population to such an extent as to sustain an actual business. Thus far, I believe I've only come across the number of registered users. This is obviously not very interesting and perhaps they're not allowed to disclose any other metrics. Especially with the free initial credit though, I guess you'll find plenty who would be willing to give it a spin. Would love to see DAUs and/or the percentage of people that tops up repeatedly after using initial credit.
To be sure, I definitely hope they succeed. It seems like they've executed very well up to this point.
" Before iTunes, I believe there simply wasn't any viable (non-illegal) alternative to get an individual song. Whereas Blendle competes with, as mentioned before, loads of other free alternatives online."
True, but these publishers can, at some point, start making their content accessible only through Blendle.
Curious loophole though - on platforms such as Pocket, one can go on Pocket's 'recommended' feed, save an NYT article straight to their own Pocket, and read the article on the Pocket platform, without every going to NYT.com (circumventing the paywall).
How is that legal? And if it remains legal, will this loophole be a major concern to Blendle and publishers?
I like the idea, but the interface is a bit weird. The on-boarding process uses a Wizard-type flow (one screen for email address, one for password, etc). Also, reading articles flows left to right instead of top down, which I find distracting.
Also, I'd prefer if the "Popular" view showed me popular articles, not popular magazines/newspapers. I don't want to drill down into each to find out what they have.
Nowadays I try to stay away from magazine articles and get my info instead from blogs. Traditional journalism calls for too much wording ceremony and useless anecdata with a very low signal-to-noise ratio.
Amazing service. I've used it many times to read articles from newspapers I'm not subscribed to. Also got my money back a couple of times. It just works.
I would really really like to pay per article for content from the New York Times, the Wall St Journal and a few other news sites with annoying paywalls. Whenever I go to subscribe I think, "This isn't worth it because I don't read publication X frequently enough to justify a bill of any size on my credit card". But if this lets me just pay $20/mo to this service and get access to N articles from a number of subscription based publications, then this is a good deal. Sign me up.
But I'm just not clear on how this works from looking at the home page. Is this all paywalled content? Or will I be paying $0.25 for something I could have read for free, like a sucker?
And also, is the NYT coming out ahead here? Does it make sense to split ~$0.30 per article with blendle instead of getting a $1/week or whatever from a regular subscription? Because I would hate to get used to using this and then have it disappear in six months because the basic economics of the business don't make sense.
If it works out I think it does, this is great. If not, hopefully it can get there soon.
Not only that, but those prices seem way too high. If a subscription from the publisher costs $20/mo. but reading a single article costs $0.25, that works out to 80 articles per month at the individual price to reach the subscription price. That's around 2-3 articles per day. If I subscribed to the NYT, I'd probably be reading more than 3 articles per day from it. I'm guessing I'd probably read at least 10 per day. The cost would be more like $0.15 per article. As someone who doesn't subscribe to the NYT, even $0.15/article seems higher than the value I place on their articles. (Obviously, because otherwise I'd subscribe.) I don't see how this works out for me as a user or them as a publisher.
> Or will I be paying $0.25 for something I could have read for free, like a sucker?
This has happened to me with articles from Trouw (Dutch newspaper) that were available on their site for free, but were paid-for on Blendle. I really hope they have fixed this by now.
Based on the article on Medium, it appears that often-refunded articles disappear from the site. Isn't this a potential vector for censorship? Well-funded adversaries (or well-coordinated activist groups) could use multiple accounts to "game the system" and eliminate undesirable content.
Hopefully this is addressed somehow. Otherwise it's a fantastic idea.
They "disappear", as in, they won't show up at the front of your timeline. They can still be accessed and/or searched for.
We also have selected curators who can promote articles worthy of your time, and a daily mail that highlights the articles we believe are interesting to you.
Gaming the system is something we're always watching out for. This is indeed something that we'll continue addressing as we learn.
Paying per article seems to have the big issue that you actually have to think whether you to want to pay or not and might feel cheated if the article is not as good (they offer refunds, but there must be a limit or catch or everyone would just refund everything).
Blendle has no flat-rate, but if you buy several articles from a single issue of a publication, Blendle will simply give you access to the complete issue (e.g., today's New York Times) when the amount you paid for the separate articles exceeds the cost of the complete issue.
I'm confused about the payment model. Isn't all Bloomberg Businessweek content, for example, available for free on their website? Or, even if some fraction of their content is behind a paywall or not available, shouldn't only that content be paid in Blendle?
On Blendle, the participating publishers have all kind of models: metered paywalls, hard paywalls, no paywalls. Publishers that also put content on the web without a paywall most often charge very little for their content (less than 10ct) in return for a human curated, ad free experience. It's like the business class for journalism :).
Granulizing payments and exposing the pay-logic will just encourage more complex gamesmanship to gather the pay... and thats already putting aside the fact that micro payments add stress which has been supplanted by the subscription model.
blendle.com/signup/account rejects email GMail addresses of the form username+label@gmail.com - even though the launch.blendle.com/hackernews.html page accepts them.
Do they offer anonymous payment options? I do not want that my content is blocked, filtered by my actual (world wide unique - only one me really) identity.
I am not a bitcoin user (because I have not find a use case for myself), but this might be an idea.
The problem for me is that if I provide my payment details, I make myself vulnerable to the person level censoring (as do other users of course). I do not think that this is where the WWW should be going.
So in principle anything that decouples my identity from the access to the content but lets me to pay for it might be fine.
If I provide you my payment details I could not be sure that you will not share my identity (even in a form of an unique id) (or start sharing in the future).
I don't want to pay per article and I don't think that it will catch on like that despite it being an idea that theoretically makes sense. I just don't think people conceptualise the value of articles like that and will find it a difficult proposition beyond the generic tech crowd.
When it's clear that a story about a project or startup is being submitted by the creator, we sometimes cut them slack about how they phrase it. We still take out linkbait, remove superlatives and gushy language and so on. In this case I think we just left the title as is.
Another thing we often do in such cases is add "Show HN" if the creator neglected to. But signup-collection pages are explicitly out of scope for Show HNs.
I have used Blendle, and currently for me the problem is that most Dutch people have totally different interests than me. Especially don't like the articles coming from the emails. There are articles on Blendle I like, for example the Dutch business news.
Founder here. Yeah, we used to send everybody the same recommendations, which makes it all pretty general interest. But we recently started personalizing the recommendations. It should get much better in the next couple of weeks :)
I look forward to the day when this will include magazines and papers from most countries, rather than just Holland or the US. The one-stop access has attractions. However, at the moment, it does not seem possible to even switch between these two. (New User)
Would there be any method for detecting if an article is available through Blendle when you hit a pay wall article through normal web browsing (eg from a Hacker News link) or I guess this would need to be something the websites implement themselves.
Could be build as a browser extension. Match URL against a list of publications, if the user clicks a button redirect to blendle to check if the specific page is available. (2 stages/manual step to avoid sending every URL you visit to blendle)
We're currently doing experiments integrating with publishers paywalls on their own sites. More here: www.mondaynote.com/2015/10/18/blendles-secret-weapon-its-toolkit-22/
Interesting. I've been toying with a similar, but slightly different pay per article microtransaction idea. I guess I might as well see what the competition is doing.
Threadjacking here, but I cannot make an account with a snkmail.com or sneakemail.com account. There's some sort of TemporaryEmailServiceDetected error coming from the backend, which is not what sneakemail is.
Edit: They responded to my email about this:
> Unfortunately it is impossible to sign up with a disposable email service. You should be able to access it by using another email service - I would recommend you to try that.
"Please upvote and get instant access today" (across the top, with an HN logo) kind of sounds like "Upvote us on HN, and then we'll give you instant access today."
I'm Blendle's founder, and I'm sorry that happened. I made sure it was removed as soon as I saw it. I enjoy using HN just as much as you guys and only wat to add good things to it :). Very much appreciate your feedback :).
I first saw Blendle from one of the HN "Who's hiring" threads while looking for jobs in Utrecht. It was right around the time that there were a ton of stories about intrusive/tracking ad networks, AdBlockers and Google's Contributor option came out.
It looked like you were one of the few out there actually building something that solves the "paying content creators for their work" problem that is the root of all the ad problems. Kudos to you. It would be cool if you combined your service with an ad blocker so that users could block ads and feel good about still giving the creators a way to get paid: join the network!
Yeah, that's bad. I sent an email explaining that such tactics are not the way to get HN to like you; in fact it's guaranteed in the long run to turn HN against a startup. Fortunately, the problem they're working on is something many people here recognize as important, so there's still a reservoir of goodwill.
I think it will take some time to figure out what kind of articles and which audience this platform is actually for.
My hope is that it will find a way to make labor/ cost intense journalism more economically viable and thus promote it but as of now magazines publish too many low effort pieces. An extreme example: the WSJ's "Habbits of highly productive people" costs 39 cents. I read it and if anything somebody should pay ME 39 cents for wasting my time. ;)