They nailed it for me with the money back option, truly no questions asked. The pre-paid wallet makes me comfortable in that I don't feel tricked/lured into some subscription or other form of overpaying. Overall very smooth UX, no annoying crap. Makes you wonder why so many websites still try to nag me into paying when it only drives me away from them.
Would like to see some (a lot) more titles, especially international, but understand they are working on this. Also, since alexandernl is reading.. please add wordcount to the webinterface and wordcount/price to emails, thanks :)
Other than that, much enjoyed. Keep up the good work!
Blendle provides both an excellent user experience and a good solution to content providers who should really not be making their own apps.
"We don’t sell a lot of news in Blendle. People apparently don’t want to spend money on something they can get everywhere for free now. People do spend money on background pieces. Great analysis. Opinion pieces. Long interviews. Stuff like that. In other words: people don’t want to spend money on the ‘what’, they want to spend money on the ‘why’..
Our users punish clickbait by refunding
..Gossip magazines, for example, get much higher refund percentages than average (some up to 50% of purchases), as some of them are basically clickbait in print. People will only pay for content they find worth their money ... As a publisher, you have to invest in incredible journalism to be able to sell them on a per-article basis. Luckily, a lot of incredible journalism is being produced every day."
[Update] Tried reading something (from WSJ, fully in English indeed), then tested and confirmed that the "refund" works. Just FYI ("random trivia"), when clicking "refund", there's additional dialog asking for the reason. Translated by Google Translate roughly as:
Why do you want your 29 cents back? We want to know why you want your money back, so we can tell the author and publisher.
[ ] I accidentally clicked on the article
[ ] I find the price too high
[ ] The article was too short
[ ] The article was too long
[ ] The article was not what I expected
[ ] The article was not legible
[ ] Other...
Regarding the refund reasons:
If you refund within a given amount of time, you actually don't have to provide any reason at all (since we figured you didn't read the article anyway). It is only after that time, that we ask you for a reason, so publishers get a better understanding of why people chose to ask for a refund after reading an article.
Now The Netherlands isn't such a big place, just 17 million people or so, so in the grand scheme of things this is not so big of a deal. But it's important to note that were Blendle founded in a bigger country this might not have gone as well at all. How would you both get a foothold in the press industry and get major coverage on national TV? Alexander is in exactly the right place and at exactly the right time.
Now they've effectively proven their worth on a reasonably large scale, they've used that cred to break into the NYT and the WSJ. How's that for an awesome business plan? I think it's the best advantage small European countries have. We've got <20m inhabitant language isolated nations all over the place. Even the celebrities with prime time are accessible. If you're in the startup scene in NL, odds are you are friendly with someone who is friendly with Alexander.
edit: of course, he has an awesome co-founder and technical team as well, you can't be successful without the tech being top notch.
"""You said you talked about the idea of Blendle when I was two years old. But Blendle is not an “idea”. Blendle is about execution. And because of that we’ve gathered more than 140.000 users in The Netherlands with a $0 marketing budget."""
Seems somewhat reasonable to assume this could be transfered to the hyperbroken academic publishing model (publisher resistence is a lot higher and older articles are worth more than for typical newspaper stuff though). One source, micropayment per article, refund policy. One can dream ;)
[downside is obviously that it kind of also creates an incentive to cite less]
Articles cost between € 0,10, and € 0,50. If you buy so much articles from one paper / magazine that it is cheaper to get the whole edition, you get the whole edition. Refund work perfect. You don't like the article -> click -> money back. No questions asked.
That right there might be the most revolutionary part of their approach to online micro payments. You could apply it to so much.
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 net-positive for journalism in general.
The extra smart thing here being, of course being twofold: First of all, they provide you this service for a myriad of outlets. (Thus limiting the actual transactions (such a hassle!) with your bank even more. And second: they provide a service for newspapers to publicise their print content online.
As far as I'm concerned, the core thing they made is a way of transferring all these 'print' articles to online. A benefit for publishers. This is now slowly shifting towards the 'one stop paywall' core business. One probably couldn't start without the other, but in the end we'll have a completely new thing. (Which I've described in several rants in Dutch.. yadieyada... stuff.)
I tend to pay more for articles these these, although for full disclosure I'd have to say that I work for a media outlet. (And yes' we're in Blendle, and we're not even print! ;) )
If you have, what were some of the pros and cons you saw in something like that?
This has been tried several times without success (Kachingle, Contenture, Readability), possibly because it was all being done on the open web or through proxies, for too little money.
The main problem is that tracking visits on the open web is unreliable with the current approaches.
Blendle arrived after tablets were common, so they can use the proxy model, and they're not doing it on subscription so they don't need to establish a viable minimum monthly amount in the mind of consumers. On the other hand they face the taxi fare problem, which subscription schemes don't.
I started work on my own approach in 2008 and so became waylaid by the tracking problem; I have a patent pending but it's possible I simply moved too late.
On the other hand, my design works for the open web, for mobile, for apps, for games, for music, basically for anything without first needing the protection and support of a walled garden like an app talking to a de facto proxy server.
Blendle's model is better for pure consumption, not for interaction.
Disclaimer: I am working on what will be a competitor.
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.
Can't wait until you get more North American publications :)
And my site isn't generating money.
By the way, I also fit the target audience: not buying newspapers, but I have added money to my Blendle account and spend it every now and then.
I am wondering about the economics though: the traction seems good, but is it enough to really add value for the publishers? I'd love to see more numbers on this.
Very awesome :) if you guys need a werkstudent as a financial analyst or just a quantitative guy who likes to play with code and excel sheets ;)
(I like the idea and I wouldn't mind to pay for things I read that interests me, unbundled. So you'd be welcome to sign up some Swedish papers!)
But as listed in the article, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Washington post are coming. So we are beefing up our international outlet.
If you're interested, visit https://launch.blendle.com and leave your email address.
We'll let you know once we launch in Sweden :)
You can however couple your existing newspaper subscriptions with Blendle, giving you access to all of their articles in our kiosk.
Note that these microtransactions are where you pay a small amount of money for a small amoint of content. They aren't the burger joint model of MMO DLC where you get the buns as part of the original game, with cheese, burger, salad and condiments as microtransaction downloads.
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 to the restroom, I guarantee they would just raise the rates until you considered pooping your pants.
