
Blendle ditches pay-per-article service - m-app
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/06/dutch-news-aggregate-website-blendle-ditches-pay-per-article-service/
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3bodyProblem
I think a 10 euro subscription service is a lazy business model, only one
worse is everything based on ad revenue. I loved the fact that you could buy
articles instead of getting another subscription.

I tried to buy an article last year, I'm not 100% sure why, but I never
succeed in reading the article that I wanted to read. I just wanted to pay
like 10 euro's until i needed to pay the next 10. But they were already
forcing you into a monthly subscription model.

Now they are just the dutch version of apple news, seems like a terrible spot
to be in.

I didn't try the audio stuff yet, that might be interesting. I enjoyed the
audio stuff from Audm, but I thought it was expensive to get a subscription.
Also to much competition in the podcast space.

I think [https://thecorrespondent.com/](https://thecorrespondent.com/) is
doing a better job at changing the world. It's clearer what you get for your
money, and you actually feel like your supporting journalism. Not sure if I
feel the same way about Blendle.

That said, i know some people who use it, but mostly because their jobs
requires them to be up to date with most newspapers.

~~~
arnvald
The problem with pay-per-article model is that every article you want to read
is a separate purchase decision ("do I want to pay for this thing or not?". In
order to make 10EUR from one user, they need to decide to buy 40 separate
articles and that means deciding 40 times whether to pay for content. Maybe a
subscription model based on credits would be better? For 10EUR/m you get 40
credits that you spend on articles, for 20EUR/m you get 100 credits etc.
Similar to Audible, maybe that would work?

~~~
Wehrdo
I used Blendle regularly for a while, and noticed that their painless refund
option really mitigated this "decision stress" for me. There were a few
articles that just turned out to be garbage click-bait, so at the end of the
article I could simply click "refund me", and immediately get refunded for
that article. It didn't happen that frequently, but knowing it was an option
made the decision to buy seem less final.

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tannhaeuser
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 telcos block MMSs. But then again,
Blendle switching to a subscription model would indicate otherwise.

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

~~~
tannhaeuser
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 carrier billing (I know since I've worked for
them), the regulatory framework around Telcos and 3/4/5G in the EU at least
takes care of monopolies.

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

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Doubl
It was worth a try but I hated the model. I want to pay a Netflix/Spotify
ballpark figure per month and be able read all newspapers. Until then I am
very happy to pay the €5 a month I currently pay for one good paper (way less
than the rate they show on their site btw)

~~~
AndrewDucker
Yeah. I'll happily pay £15-£20 for access to all newspapers. I'm not going to
pay any one newspaper for a subscription, because I don't read that many
articles from any individual paper.

~~~
Doubl
That's it, exactly. I wouldn't read an American paper too often but I'd like
to have the option when there's a big American story. Ditto Australia or even
foreign language papers. I'm never going to take out a sub to them but this
way they'd make a little from me sometimes.

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jillesvangurp
I've been following them for as long as they've existed. Their business model
with per article payments never made sense to me. And those 100K articles that
they sold is a clear indication that this is not working. That's not users but
articles sold for something like 25 cents. 25K in revenue in other words.
That's nothing and they ve been citing the same number for years.

60K subscriptions is not nothing but of course not a lot of revenue either;
though 600K/month does sound it should be able to sustain a small company and
if you can grow that it can actually turn into substantial revenue. Of course,
like with Spotify, a lot would flow directly to the publishers.

Blendle has always danced around the one thing they can't deliver which is a
subscription service that offers access to all/most relevant news articles
currently locked behind paywalls of the few surviving news papers that
struggle to make money this way (most of them are failing or just getting by).

The likes of the New York times seem to be doing ok-ish because they are big
enough to still be able to produce quality news and have a large number of
subscribers. Most of the rest has given up on the notion entirely by either
focusing on dwindling paper sales, or ad driven news on web sites, or like the
Guardian calling for donations. It's a race to the bottom.

So, I hope they succeed but I'm pessimistic about their chances. This doesn't
sound like a winning formula.

~~~
Tobias42
The article didn't say that they sold 100000 articles, but that they have
100000 users that payed for individual articles. We don't know how many
articles those users bought on average, but probably much more than one.

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Freak_NL
Blendle didn't succeed in getting the major national newspapers on board,
because providing access to all content would make them a publisher competing
directly with each newspaper's own subscriptions.

If you consider the price of a full subscription to a quality newspaper, you
can see why Blendle would be way too cheap to sustain as a publishing partner;
especially with a monthly flat fee.

As a reader, I would love to pay what I am paying now for one newspaper to
gain access to more newspapers — particularly worldwide (Volkskrant, NRC,
German FAZ, some Belgian ones, some American ones, some British (although The
Guardian is already accessible — I donate a small sum yearly for their
efforts)).

I wouldn't necessarily read more, but a more varied selection of articles. A
flat fee is a requirement though.

~~~
Nextgrid
> If you consider the price of a full subscription to a quality newspaper

Newspaper subscription prices are extremely inflated when you compare what
they would’ve earning from ads (and they were happy with ads until blockers
came around).

If they actually priced the subscriptions for the same amount ads would bring
them from an average reader (excluding ad blockers) they would be much more
affordable.

Sadly, just like the movie industry, the publishers are being greedy and shot
themselves in the foot.

~~~
calcifer
Guardian's annual contribution starts at €0.96 per week [1]. Greedy? If
anything, that's too cheap.

[1]
[https://support.theguardian.com/eu/contribute](https://support.theguardian.com/eu/contribute)

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gpvos
What I'd like is unlimited access to my main newspaper, plus a fairly high but
limited number of articles in all other newspapers and magazines (say 100
articles per month, spread over all other publications), maybe with the
possibility to carry over unused credits for a few months. A digital
subscription to my current newspaper is almost 30 EUR a month. I think this
should be doable for the same price, assuming that people who read other
papers will occasionally read something from my paper, and money is
distributed according to popularity (apart from a base payment to one's main
paper). It should be possible to get newspapers to cooperate to do this,
possibly through something like Blendle.

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flas9sd
A successful Blendle gives the reader independence and absolves the user of
getting intimate with all the digital sales strategies at publishers. Pocket
does not position itself as distributor, so I welcome Blendle as broker. They
offer fulltext export to Pocket. The web based reading experience of Blendle
is also solid. Though I like pay-per-article, publishers and Blendle
themselves seem to disagree on its profitability.

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andy_ppp
As I’ve found out; people _say_ they want to pay per article for content, but
they much prefer free in reality.

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michaelt
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.

~~~
flas9sd
publishers probably wouldn't like this feature. There's a dated small js
bookmarklet effort ([http://ronkeizer.github.io/blendle-
bookmarklet/](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.

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technocratius
From now on you'll have to pay 10eur a month to access a small selection of
old papers (i.e. not today's) and some magazines. Too much for too little, I
feel.

~~~
m-app
AFAICT, you can still read today's news, but the major difference being not
being able anymore to browse through magazines and newspapers, but their team
and algorithms determining what will be highlighted. I feel this is a major
step back on an Internet that is already redacted enough on multiple
feeds/timelines.

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55555
People don't like microtransactions. Deciding if each article is worth a
quarter is a bad user experience.

~~~
sgeisler
The concept of micro transactions isn't the problem imo. The lack of
automation is.

If there was a browser plugin that automatically paid up to x$ if an
authorized website asks for it, but never more than y$ per month that would be
a good compromise between subscription model and single article purchases.
There would be the initial authorization, but after that no further
interactions. The news website, instead of displaying a paywall, could talk to
the plugin to facilitate the payment.

As long as you'd be fine of loosing up to y$ in case of a bug/hack/whatever
this should work fine. If publishers were to increase prices they had to fear
to cross the yolo-line of x$ and the user being explicitly asked for consent,
that should keep them in check too.

~~~
andy_ppp
You’re going to persuade millions of people to install a browser extension so
they can pay for content? You have the incentives backwards...

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mark_l_watson
Too bad, I liked the service. I have some credit for reading articles and I
wonder how they will handle that.

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mobilemidget
This discussion already started about a week ago in The Netherlands

For dutch speakers [https://tweakers.net/nieuws/153570/blendle-stopt-met-
verkoop...](https://tweakers.net/nieuws/153570/blendle-stopt-met-verkoop-
losse-artikelen.html)

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siscia
Honestly I believe people, in general, just don't care about what the read
online.

The reality is that either you believe at everything you read online or you
understand that the world is so complex that it is too difficult to explain it
in few capitols.

The reasonable middle ground of in deep reportages is disappearing because too
complex anyway to be discussed with the "general public".

I wonder if it is possible to make people want to subscribe to in-deep
articles with advertis, something in the line of: "The informed executive
reads Blendle" (or something along the line) so that people who don't read
Blendle are automatically considered morons or uniformed.

Is more a marketing stunt but it may be interested.

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CaptainMarvel
I tried signing up for Blendle, but they rejected my email address for failing
validation. I contacted their customer service, but their response was
incredibly poor.

~~~
klez
Do you mind elaborating on what made it poor? I was waiting for them to open
in Italy, so I never had any real chance of interacting with them, so I'm
curious about what the experience would have been like.

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eisa01
Will this apply to the English service too? That has never had a subscription
option to my knowledge

