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. ;)
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.
So this should be a lot higher than (cost of paper)/(number of articles)
Not sure that 40c is right, mind you, just that you can't really compare it to the total number of articles, if most people don't read most of them.
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.
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.
"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.
https://www.vn.nl/het-debat-21/
We hear you. And we're working on it. This is only the first step of which many more will follow in the coming months.
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.
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.
They also have the link sharing you mentioned.
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.
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.
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.
If not, it's pretty hopeless for this application.
[edit] it's only the user experienced latency that needs to be that low, of course. And you might be able to get away with 10s. But not 100.
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.
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.
The HTTP status code has been there since 1994, but no-one has implemented it yet...
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).
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.
Seems like a good case study is in the making.
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)
> 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.)
If you want, you can send me an email (see other comment) and we'll get this sorted.
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.
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.
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.
Good luck Blendle & alexandernl.
Ingenious.
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.
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?
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.
During registration, the page says "We have emailed you at <email>. Click the confirmation link to continue."
But it wasn't obvious what the confirmation link was (it turned out to be the button labelled "Browse the Blendle newsstand").
So what's your method to search or discover good blog content regarding a specific subject ?
I actually get pretty much all my tech reads from HN (sometimes browsing the comments before even reading the article) and from links in Twitter.
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.
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.
Hopefully this is addressed somehow. Otherwise it's a fantastic idea.
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).
It's one of my pet peeves, please fix it!
Signup email sends me to a page where I get an error: "Hey, the link you used refers to a non-existing page. We're sorry!"
URL: https://blendle.com/kiosk?campaign=activation&content=button...
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).
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.
update: here it is: https://blendle.com/issue/time/bnl-time-20160321
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.
Maybe they shouldn't be saying that.
Which is funny because there is no HN API that can actually prove that you upvoted something.
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!
