
Pay-Per-Story Platform Blendle Goes Live in Germany - JeanMertz
https://medium.com/on-blendle/pay-per-story-platform-blendle-goes-live-in-germany-37b53dbf360b
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omegant
I can't find the subscription costs. How did you manage to get the papers to
sign? I've been expecting for a service like yours for some time, but here in
Spain the news papers are too dumb to try something like this (unless all the
other big ones have done it first) you only have to look at the Google law,
they are desperate and lost.

~~~
JeanMertz
There are no subscriptions.

You sign up, and only pay for what you read. Articles cost €0,30 on average,
with smaller news-type articles being cheaper than longreads (interviews,
opinion pieces, backstory articles).

On signup you get €2,50 for free, and then another €2,50 when you topup your
wallet the first time.

Regarding signing up the publishers. This took a long time in The Netherlands,
but getting an investment from The New York Times and Axel Springer certainly
helped speed up the German launch.

~~~
eevilspock
I hope your model works as an antidote to the perverse incentives of ad-based
revenue, but I wonder if you could improve the incentives even more. There
will still be advantages to using click-bait and writing that manipulates our
curiosity. If you make it trivial to get a refund, that will greatly negate
those incentives, but it also enables freeloaders, no?

Jean, I would love to hear your or Blendle's thoughs on my variation of a
reader payment scheme:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960)

~~~
JeanMertz
In fact, refunds have proven to be a great way to combat click-bait links. The
example we've given before is gossip magazines, which thrive on click-bait
(purchase-bait?) titles on their front covers.

In Blendle, we see a high refund rate on these types of magazine articles,
when the title suggests something else than the article presents to the
reader.

Freeloaders have turned out to be only a minor issue, whom we are willing to
live with, if it means we have a great user experience for 99% of the other
people using Blendle in good faith. We're of course thinking of ways to tackle
this as well, but never at the cost of user experience.

RE: Being asked whether or not I want to spend $0.25 or $0.50 twenty or fifty
times a day is not an appealing prospect.

I agree, this is indeed something we work to improve every day. The two
biggest features to combat this are refunds and low-friction purchases. The
latter we implement by not requiring any action except for clicking on the
text you want to read.

------
sharpercoder
I really like the ability to pay instead of getting ads. However, my big
opposition to Blendle is that it breaks the web. How do you guys feel about
this?

~~~
an_ko
What do you mean by "break the web" here?

I've seen the phrase used to criticise lots of things, e.g.: SOPA/PIPA,
mobile-hostile CSS, semantically incorrect HTTP codes.

~~~
sharpercoder
Linking to an article does not result in a guaranteed full information access.
I am never sure the receiving party is able to read the information.

------
bitJericho
I really want this in the us. I use adblock and will never shut it off. Also
something like this would give me a real incentive to finish reading an
article since "I paid for it after all."

~~~
JeanMertz
We're already got The Washington Post, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal,
and soon The New York Times in our kiosk. The interface is still in Dutch (for
now), but it's a start:

[https://blendle.com/kiosk/engels](https://blendle.com/kiosk/engels)

Also, be sure to sign up at
[https://launch.blendle.com](https://launch.blendle.com), we're working hard
to get this across the Atlantic, stay tuned!

~~~
bitJericho
That's great. Will this work such that if I see an article on HN I can somehow
use your service seamlessly? I'd rather get my news from HN (what I do now)
than visiting a different aggregator site.

~~~
JeanMertz
We've recently launched our "Pay with Blendle" micropayments button on a Dutch
publisher's site[0] which allows you to read the article on the publisher's
site, but pay using your Blendle wallet, using the same principles (pay-per-
article, one-click-refunds, seamless UX).

Stay tuned for more news on this front.

[0]: [http://www.vn.nl/elementaire-deeltjes-gerard-t-
hooft/](http://www.vn.nl/elementaire-deeltjes-gerard-t-hooft/)

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peteretep
Cannot wait until you launch this in the UK. The email alerting doesn't seem
to let me tell you what country I'm in...

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mightymaike
I wonder if they analyse your reading habbits and sell this to third party's.

~~~
mverwijs
We make money by selling articles to you. Not by selling your data to someone
else.

------
polskibus
As far as I know, Piano Platform works well in various countries in Europe. I
wonder how does Blendle compare to Piano, from user's and publisher's
perspective.

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forcer
I love the concept. I hope the execution will be right. e.g. if I pay for
Economist story, I won't be bombarded with their popups.

~~~
JeanMertz
We don't like popups and ads either, so you most certainly won't find them on
our website. You only pay for what you want, and can always refund with a
single click.

We have a good privacy policy, here's the (loosely translated, this is not the
official translation) first paragraph:

    
    
      Blendle takes your privacy very seriously and will store and use your
      information in a safe and secure way. Publishers have a tendency to demand that
      we give them the email addresses of everyone who reads their articles, but we
      refuse to give in to these requests. Also, we don't do ads, so we have no
      incentive to collect data to sell you relevant ads.

------
okal
This is really problematic, IMO. The idea of paying only for what you like,
rather than what you read. People will inevitably end up "voting", as it were,
only for stories that line up with their biases.

~~~
eevilspock
I deeply agree that human bias is a problem in general, but I prefer the
reader's bias for the content over the bias of the advertiser or the reader's
bias for click-bait. Do you prefer the current world where clicks, click-bait
and other manipulations determine money flows?

The grossly perverted incentives of the ad-driven web aside, is what people
read today less subject to bias? People choose, for example, to read/watch the
NY Times vs WSJ, Politico vs Drudge Report, or MSNBC vs Fox News based on
which publications line up with their biases.

If I don't get to decide whether my reading choices are due to my biases or my
ability to discern quality or truth, who does? You? Google? Huff Post? HN's
ranking algorithm X the aggregate mindset of HN readers? None of these are
biased?

People voting with their wallets is the bedrock of the free market, which
despite its shortcomings is vastly better than an economy driven by clicks and
the manipukation thereof, and driven by advertisers and their agendas.

~~~
okal
Let me construct a scenario:

I come across some well done (by some objective measure: good references,
background checks), long form investigative piece. It seems interesting, so I
read it, but then find that it clashes with some deeply held belief of mine. I
decide at that point that I want my money back, because whatever it is I read
made me uncomfortable, or I just didn't like it. What this ends up
incentivizing is journalism that merely echoes the beliefs of your target
demographic, dressed in beautiful language.

My problem is with the money back feature, not the entire idea of it. I think
some other measure of engagement e.g. how much time one spends on an article,
whether one keeps going back to a particular passage over and over, should be
what determines if the publisher gets paid. Not whether the reader "likes" it.

~~~
JeanMertz
One way we try to solve this is that you can refund "no questions asked" for
the first ~20 seconds or so (since you probably weren't able to read the
article past the first paragraph, and maybe accidentally clicked).

After those 20 seconds, you can still refund for 24h, but you get asked a
single question: "Why do you want a refund?", with a couple of reasons (too
short, too pricy, unreadable, not what I expected, ...) and a freeform option
to give your own reason for the refund.

This is a metric we _do_ pass on to the publishers, so they know why people
refund certain articles. There is more we can do to understand refund-reasons
better, but it's a start.

