5 ms·

The Dutch tech whiz who could save journalism

86 points by bootload 11y ago

timwaagh 11y ago
i hope they succeed it would be much better if people started paying for their entertainment again instead of getting bombarded by free stuff. however this is probably why they won't succeed.
- alexandernl 11y ago
  We're at 650.000 users in NL and DE, out of which 1/5 actually pay with real money. It's not everyone, but it's a start :).
rolfvandekrol 11y ago
I use Blendle occasionally in the Netherlands and it works amazing. In my case, it allows me to read articles I would otherwise simply not read. I'm not willing to pay for a subscription to a magazine or newspaper just because I like one article. Buying a single article however, for 0.25 euro, works perfectly fine for me. Especially because Blendle provides the infrastructure for paying, so the transaction takes very little effort.
akie 11y ago
I didn't know Blendle before, but I gave it a go after reading this article and have to say I'm impressed. Being the news junkie that I am, though, I can totally see how I would end up spending more than €50/month on this. Not sure if that's worth it for me to be honest. I would totally buy a fixed cost contract though. My Spotify and Netflix are about €9/month, so if I could get quality journalism for €9/month (or even €20/month) I would totally be on board. But paying €0.25 per article... not for me.
- drxzcl 11y ago
  I spend about that on a digital NYT subscription. It's not as good as a "netflix for news", but it fills out the gaps in internet coverage pretty nicely. I think Blendle (or something like it) is a necessary step on the way to netflix-for-news, but I'm happy to wait this one out.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
  Their daily "best article" mail is quite good, I read more diverse and higher quality articles than I would have otherwise. I think they are still experimenting with pricing, I don't mind 0,25€ but some articles (looking at you Spiegel) were 1,99€, which is insane - I requested a refund, which luckily takes just a click. Annoyingly they don't show prices beforehand.
  - draugadrotten 11y ago
    > Annoyingly they don't show prices beforehand. Is that even legal in EU consumer law? http://www.consumerhelp.ie/pricing-rules http://www.consumerhelp.ie/pricing-rules "Shops and service providers must display their prices, and there are rules on how they must be displayed. You have the right to clear and accurate information on the prices of goods and services so that you can compare prices and make informed choices."
    - mercer 11y ago
      Perhaps the no-questions-asked money back policy changes this? Just guessing.
- vincentkriek 11y ago
  I fear that exactly this is the problem. There is a pretty big market for good journalism to be read online. People don't want to be bound to one source (traditional subscription) but I don't see micro transactions working here. Blendle has been pretty vocal about the number of users but I fear most of them aren't return customers. The interface and idea is good but a flat fee could skyrocket this.
- alexandernl 11y ago
  Blendle co-founder here. A flat fee is definitely something we're thinking about. But, the publishers have to be comfortable with it (and for newspapers, most of the time they are charging >$15 per month for a digital sub). Also, as an option, we'd always like to offer pay-as-you-go for users who don't want a subscription (a problem we set out to fix in the first place).
- cornedor 11y ago
  If you read a lot from a single paper you could buy the complete paper, if you've read article from that paper the price for that single article is removed from the paper's price. Some papers are quite cheap, for example, De Volkskrant (Dutch paper) is only 0.89 euro, a single article costs maybe 0.25, if you've read that article the paper will only kost 0.64. But if you read a lot of different papers, that would still be quite expensive indeed
flexie 11y ago
I am looking forward to micropayments but I sure hope it will be platform independent. Blendle is just another platform like iTunes, App Store, Netflix etc. Platforms are good for the platform's founders and investors and they take care of the transaction cost and do provide some marketing although I often find platforms limit my choice instead of expanding it. I don't mind the existence of platforms if they don't have exclusivity on content. But I would love an alternative, where you could pay content creators 2, 5, 10, 20 or a few hundred cents directly. I can chat, phone or email anyone directly for free or almost for free, even with advanced security. Why can't I pay them for free or low cost? Isn't the tech involved in sending or receiving a secure email with attachement more advanced than the tech that makes sure one bank credits the same amount someone else's bank debits?
- ghaff 11y ago
  The standard knock against micropayments is mental transaction costs--going back well over a decade. I think it's fair to say that the cost of doing the payment transfer isn't really an issue; even if it is with current systems, that can be dealt with. However, there is an issue with having to explicitly decide to pay 5 or 10 cents every time you want to read something online. And if it involves having to get an email with attachment sent to me, the mental overhead and friction is even worse. It's not that people will never buy but there's a huge difference between free and just a few cents.
  - daemin 11y ago
    That's why batching needs to be used, so all those little 5-10c transactions get accumulated and sent as one larger one. Then once a month or when you've read $5-10 worth of articles you'll be charged. This usually means that there will be one, or a handful of, providers so that you won't have an outstanding tab or credit at too many places. So there we get back to a subscription magazine model. It's easier mentally to have one, or a few, subscriptions charging a fixed amount per month to read content. Unfortunately even if you do pay $5-$10 per month for a subscription, the publication can make more money from you by selling ads in the publication.
noir-york 11y ago
I like what they're doing - I do not want to take out a full subscription to all the possible news sources just to read a couple of articles a month. However, their "iTunes for Journalism" model is not the best one; "Spotify for journalism" is better: fixed monthly price and all you can eat. I do not want to expend the mental energy thinking about whether an article is worth the 0.25c. Blendle also has to recognize that the value is different - you can replay a song many times, but an article loses value very quickly - read it once, maybe go back to it for reference, and that's it. Pricing needs to take this into account.
- gedrap 11y ago
  It certainly adds some cognitive overhead to the user. I think a solution might be buying credits, e.g. you have bronze/silver/gold credits, and each article could be priced at 1 bronze/silver/gold credit (because the price being e.g. 3 credits would keep the overhead). This layer of abstraction removes the user from thinking in terms of money (e.g. this article cost 0.25 euro), a bit. In terms of monthly subscription, I would assume pricing articles individually makes it easy to deal with the publishers? X people read it at price of $Y, so you get X*$Y minus some fee, can't get any easier. It would get much more tricky if trying to split the monthly cost.
  - alexandernl 11y ago
    We thought about credits. It might work, I'm doubting about this one because if feels a bit user-unfriendly to make it less transparant. What do you think?
    - mercer 11y ago
      I much prefer the transparency of an actual price. The cognitive overhead of converting credits in your head to euro is much higher, and I suspect most of us do so anyways (I know I do at festivals, for example, at least until a certain level of inebriation). Furthermore, credits can come across as a bit 'sleazy' to the consumer. Every person I know assumes that, in general, credit-based systems are implemented to make more money (again, festivals: I just want another beer, not buy another ten credits if I just need one more to get my fucking drink!).
mercer 11y ago
Klöpping is an interesting character to me. From his appearances as a 'tech whiz' on one of the biggest (if not the biggest) Dutch talk shows I get the (possibly wrong) impression that he's the type of 'tech whiz' that isn't so much really good at any particular 'tech', but rather that he's really good at knowing about tech. But I might be wrong. And I have to say: he really is pretty good at what he does. I don't recall ever hearing him explain something or write about something in tech that was outright wrong, which in my experience is quite rare even for 'good' tech journalists. I find myself often cringing at how they get some detail wrong, as well as cringing that I'm probably one of a small group of extreme geeks who would even notice it. On some level, despite him actually being good at his stuff, I feel an kind of vague dislike for him at times. I suppose that feeling comes from the fact that he's not just very knowledgeable in a field that I consider 'mine', but that he's so damn good at explaining it an somehow making it 'cool'. And perhaps it's because it underlines how important presentation and social skills are alongside 'raw' skills. I suppose I'd feel similar about someone like Kevin Rose had he been a very public face of 'my tribe', rather than mostly operating within it. It's not a feeling that I would describe as justified or good. Mostly just interesting that it's there at all. When it comes down to it I love having a 'spokesperson' who doesn't misrepresent the things I love. (As it's quite likely that he, at very least, lurks on HN: Hi Klöpping, sorry that I think you're an annoying little punk sometimes without good reason. I really like what you're doing with Blendle; any way you could allow it to integrate with Instapaper?)
- alexandernl 11y ago
  Doing my best to balance my inherent tech optimism and pessimism on Dutch TV, while trying to make it interesting enough to have it be on TV at all, all the while trying to take not too many short cuts to make people like yourself not too angry -- I'm still learning how to do that :).
  - mercer 11y ago
    I knew it! Anyways, don't worry about pissing those of us who are on the nerdier, less-social side of the spectrum. That's our/my problem, not yours. And from my experience it's definitely not that you're 'off' or oversimplifying the things you talk about. You strike a good balance. (sadly, I just can't stand DWDD anymore... I blame De Snijtafel.)
mojuba 11y ago
First thought after reading this: let's say there is a good overview of markets from a known economist, written in a few hours, vs. a deep look into corruption in charities/government/whatever that took many months of research and investigation. Why would these two articles cost the same few dozen of pennies? Wouldn't it devalue more time-consuming work? Of course you can draw parallels with music. A track with an orchestral recording vs. solo piano recording, or a rock band vs. purely computer electronic music, all cost the same $1/€1/£1. At the same time concert tickets for a fully-blown symphonic orchestra are usually more expensive than that of a piano concert (adjusted to fame/importance, etc.) Maybe it is not a problem after all. Or maybe it is, time will tell.
- mercer 11y ago
  First off, they don't have to cost the same amount of money. And second, the amount of work/quality affects the reputation of the publication, which in turn affects the amount of people that pay for the article and the price that can be asked for it. On Blendle, I've not paid pennies for articles that seemed interesting but came from low-reputation publications, and I've paid more than a buck for articles that didn't immediately catch my eye, but were published in a top magazine.
- notahacker 11y ago
  The known economist would probably point out that the supply of known economists is much smaller than the supply of journalists capable of undertaking a research investigation, not least because known economists have spent a decade or more honing their craft and developing their reputation. Both parties are, as I understand it, free to vary their prices if they think they can earn more at a higher price point.
edwinjm 11y ago
I use it and it works really well. For the price of a cup of coffee, I read a week of the best articles from a whole range of newspapers and magazines. And when you accidentally clicked a link or an article is really bad, you can ask your money back with a single mouse click.
Confiks 11y ago
I've posted this before, but I'll say it again: A fun thing about Blendle is that it is open source. At least, the front-end is, and probably unintentionally. They left their Webpack source maps on the server [1]. Chrome automatically unpacks the source map into a directory structure in the 'sources' debug view. It's nice to see how they are building their React application. On two separate occasions, four months ago and a year ago, I've sent them an email about this, but never got a reply back. [1] https://www.blendle.com/js/app.js.map https://www.blendle.com/js/app.js.map
eveningcoffee 11y ago
I think that this kind of business model hides an threat unless anonymous payments are provided: you will completely loose your privacy as everything you read is now connected to your more or less real identity and actually nothing prevents them to serve you the ads, especially because you are now identified better than before. I think this is also the reason why Apple installed the ad-blocker - they want to enter into this market and grow it as it appears that ad-based business model is not working for them.
- singletonaccnt 11y ago
  Yes, I also find this really concerning.. I use Blendle to look up articles relating to pedophilia, to see how it's portrayed in the media. Now Blendle is giving away €2,50 on signup, so I can create new accounts as I go along... but I really wouldn't want to connect my regular account with it, and I would for my usage, but there really is no way to do it. If you're wondering how the subject is portrayed... very badly. Almost always the molester stereotype, especially in British media. You might want to read up on these threads if you want to get a better picture: - https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/18782/what-should-i-do-if-my-15-year-old-son-is-sexually-interested-in-younger-boys https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/18782/what-sho... - https://www.quora.com/Pedophilia/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-a-pedophile-1/answer/Ben-Kirssen https://www.quora.com/Pedophilia/What-does-it-feel-like-to-b...
Shivetya 11y ago
With the thirty percent cut they leave a big opportunity for others to step in. While the music industry may have little choice when iTunes made its debut there are far more sources of journalism and many of those have well developed web based outlets. How well does this product do with independents? Tech has opened the door for everyone to be a journalist and perhaps through a tool like this some could get more exposure? To be honest, with good web familiarity I don't need an aggregator for news. I don't even care for Apple's attempt which in itself my impact Blendle
kriro 11y ago
If this works (the cynic in me feels people don't read anymore), and the numbers that I've heard through the rumor mill indicate it does with about 100-150k paying users with decent return payments + a 30%, it might be a decent attack vector into the dreaded academic publishing landscape eventually. Their 30$/article fees are just a tad bit on the ridiculous side.

86 points by bootload 11y ago

i hope they succeed it would be much better if people started paying for their entertainment again instead of getting bombarded by free stuff. however this is probably why they won't succeed.

alexandernl 11y ago
We're at 650.000 users in NL and DE, out of which 1/5 actually pay with real money. It's not everyone, but it's a start :).

rolfvandekrol 11y ago

I use Blendle occasionally in the Netherlands and it works amazing. In my case, it allows me to read articles I would otherwise simply not read. I'm not willing to pay for a subscription to a magazine or newspaper just because I like one article. Buying a single article however, for 0.25 euro, works perfectly fine for me. Especially because Blendle provides the infrastructure for paying, so the transaction takes very little effort.

akie 11y ago

I didn't know Blendle before, but I gave it a go after reading this article and have to say I'm impressed. Being the news junkie that I am, though, I can totally see how I would end up spending more than €50/month on this. Not sure if that's worth it for me to be honest. I would totally buy a fixed cost contract though. My Spotify and Netflix are about €9/month, so if I could get quality journalism for €9/month (or even €20/month) I would totally be on board. But paying €0.25 per article... not for me.

drxzcl 11y ago
I spend about that on a digital NYT subscription. It's not as good as a "netflix for news", but it fills out the gaps in internet coverage pretty nicely. I think Blendle (or something like it) is a necessary step on the way to netflix-for-news, but I'm happy to wait this one out.
MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
Their daily "best article" mail is quite good, I read more diverse and higher quality articles than I would have otherwise. I think they are still experimenting with pricing, I don't mind 0,25€ but some articles (looking at you Spiegel) were 1,99€, which is insane - I requested a refund, which luckily takes just a click. Annoyingly they don't show prices beforehand.
- draugadrotten 11y ago
  > Annoyingly they don't show prices beforehand. Is that even legal in EU consumer law? http://www.consumerhelp.ie/pricing-rules http://www.consumerhelp.ie/pricing-rules "Shops and service providers must display their prices, and there are rules on how they must be displayed. You have the right to clear and accurate information on the prices of goods and services so that you can compare prices and make informed choices."
  - mercer 11y ago
    Perhaps the no-questions-asked money back policy changes this? Just guessing.
vincentkriek 11y ago
I fear that exactly this is the problem. There is a pretty big market for good journalism to be read online. People don't want to be bound to one source (traditional subscription) but I don't see micro transactions working here. Blendle has been pretty vocal about the number of users but I fear most of them aren't return customers. The interface and idea is good but a flat fee could skyrocket this.
alexandernl 11y ago
Blendle co-founder here. A flat fee is definitely something we're thinking about. But, the publishers have to be comfortable with it (and for newspapers, most of the time they are charging >$15 per month for a digital sub). Also, as an option, we'd always like to offer pay-as-you-go for users who don't want a subscription (a problem we set out to fix in the first place).
cornedor 11y ago
If you read a lot from a single paper you could buy the complete paper, if you've read article from that paper the price for that single article is removed from the paper's price. Some papers are quite cheap, for example, De Volkskrant (Dutch paper) is only 0.89 euro, a single article costs maybe 0.25, if you've read that article the paper will only kost 0.64. But if you read a lot of different papers, that would still be quite expensive indeed

flexie 11y ago

I am looking forward to micropayments but I sure hope it will be platform independent. Blendle is just another platform like iTunes, App Store, Netflix etc. Platforms are good for the platform's founders and investors and they take care of the transaction cost and do provide some marketing although I often find platforms limit my choice instead of expanding it. I don't mind the existence of platforms if they don't have exclusivity on content. But I would love an alternative, where you could pay content creators 2, 5, 10, 20 or a few hundred cents directly. I can chat, phone or email anyone directly for free or almost for free, even with advanced security. Why can't I pay them for free or low cost? Isn't the tech involved in sending or receiving a secure email with attachement more advanced than the tech that makes sure one bank credits the same amount someone else's bank debits?

ghaff 11y ago
The standard knock against micropayments is mental transaction costs--going back well over a decade. I think it's fair to say that the cost of doing the payment transfer isn't really an issue; even if it is with current systems, that can be dealt with. However, there is an issue with having to explicitly decide to pay 5 or 10 cents every time you want to read something online. And if it involves having to get an email with attachment sent to me, the mental overhead and friction is even worse. It's not that people will never buy but there's a huge difference between free and just a few cents.
- daemin 11y ago
  That's why batching needs to be used, so all those little 5-10c transactions get accumulated and sent as one larger one. Then once a month or when you've read $5-10 worth of articles you'll be charged. This usually means that there will be one, or a handful of, providers so that you won't have an outstanding tab or credit at too many places. So there we get back to a subscription magazine model. It's easier mentally to have one, or a few, subscriptions charging a fixed amount per month to read content. Unfortunately even if you do pay $5-$10 per month for a subscription, the publication can make more money from you by selling ads in the publication.

noir-york 11y ago

I like what they're doing - I do not want to take out a full subscription to all the possible news sources just to read a couple of articles a month. However, their "iTunes for Journalism" model is not the best one; "Spotify for journalism" is better: fixed monthly price and all you can eat. I do not want to expend the mental energy thinking about whether an article is worth the 0.25c. Blendle also has to recognize that the value is different - you can replay a song many times, but an article loses value very quickly - read it once, maybe go back to it for reference, and that's it. Pricing needs to take this into account.

gedrap 11y ago
It certainly adds some cognitive overhead to the user. I think a solution might be buying credits, e.g. you have bronze/silver/gold credits, and each article could be priced at 1 bronze/silver/gold credit (because the price being e.g. 3 credits would keep the overhead). This layer of abstraction removes the user from thinking in terms of money (e.g. this article cost 0.25 euro), a bit. In terms of monthly subscription, I would assume pricing articles individually makes it easy to deal with the publishers? X people read it at price of $Y, so you get X*$Y minus some fee, can't get any easier. It would get much more tricky if trying to split the monthly cost.
- alexandernl 11y ago
  We thought about credits. It might work, I'm doubting about this one because if feels a bit user-unfriendly to make it less transparant. What do you think?
  - mercer 11y ago
    I much prefer the transparency of an actual price. The cognitive overhead of converting credits in your head to euro is much higher, and I suspect most of us do so anyways (I know I do at festivals, for example, at least until a certain level of inebriation). Furthermore, credits can come across as a bit 'sleazy' to the consumer. Every person I know assumes that, in general, credit-based systems are implemented to make more money (again, festivals: I just want another beer, not buy another ten credits if I just need one more to get my fucking drink!).

mercer 11y ago

Klöpping is an interesting character to me. From his appearances as a 'tech whiz' on one of the biggest (if not the biggest) Dutch talk shows I get the (possibly wrong) impression that he's the type of 'tech whiz' that isn't so much really good at any particular 'tech', but rather that he's really good at knowing about tech. But I might be wrong. And I have to say: he really is pretty good at what he does. I don't recall ever hearing him explain something or write about something in tech that was outright wrong, which in my experience is quite rare even for 'good' tech journalists. I find myself often cringing at how they get some detail wrong, as well as cringing that I'm probably one of a small group of extreme geeks who would even notice it. On some level, despite him actually being good at his stuff, I feel an kind of vague dislike for him at times. I suppose that feeling comes from the fact that he's not just very knowledgeable in a field that I consider 'mine', but that he's so damn good at explaining it an somehow making it 'cool'. And perhaps it's because it underlines how important presentation and social skills are alongside 'raw' skills. I suppose I'd feel similar about someone like Kevin Rose had he been a very public face of 'my tribe', rather than mostly operating within it. It's not a feeling that I would describe as justified or good. Mostly just interesting that it's there at all. When it comes down to it I love having a 'spokesperson' who doesn't misrepresent the things I love. (As it's quite likely that he, at very least, lurks on HN: Hi Klöpping, sorry that I think you're an annoying little punk sometimes without good reason. I really like what you're doing with Blendle; any way you could allow it to integrate with Instapaper?)

alexandernl 11y ago
Doing my best to balance my inherent tech optimism and pessimism on Dutch TV, while trying to make it interesting enough to have it be on TV at all, all the while trying to take not too many short cuts to make people like yourself not too angry -- I'm still learning how to do that :).
- mercer 11y ago
  I knew it! Anyways, don't worry about pissing those of us who are on the nerdier, less-social side of the spectrum. That's our/my problem, not yours. And from my experience it's definitely not that you're 'off' or oversimplifying the things you talk about. You strike a good balance. (sadly, I just can't stand DWDD anymore... I blame De Snijtafel.)

mojuba 11y ago

First thought after reading this: let's say there is a good overview of markets from a known economist, written in a few hours, vs. a deep look into corruption in charities/government/whatever that took many months of research and investigation. Why would these two articles cost the same few dozen of pennies? Wouldn't it devalue more time-consuming work? Of course you can draw parallels with music. A track with an orchestral recording vs. solo piano recording, or a rock band vs. purely computer electronic music, all cost the same $1/€1/£1. At the same time concert tickets for a fully-blown symphonic orchestra are usually more expensive than that of a piano concert (adjusted to fame/importance, etc.) Maybe it is not a problem after all. Or maybe it is, time will tell.

mercer 11y ago
First off, they don't have to cost the same amount of money. And second, the amount of work/quality affects the reputation of the publication, which in turn affects the amount of people that pay for the article and the price that can be asked for it. On Blendle, I've not paid pennies for articles that seemed interesting but came from low-reputation publications, and I've paid more than a buck for articles that didn't immediately catch my eye, but were published in a top magazine.
notahacker 11y ago
The known economist would probably point out that the supply of known economists is much smaller than the supply of journalists capable of undertaking a research investigation, not least because known economists have spent a decade or more honing their craft and developing their reputation. Both parties are, as I understand it, free to vary their prices if they think they can earn more at a higher price point.

edwinjm 11y ago

I use it and it works really well. For the price of a cup of coffee, I read a week of the best articles from a whole range of newspapers and magazines. And when you accidentally clicked a link or an article is really bad, you can ask your money back with a single mouse click.

Confiks 11y ago

I've posted this before, but I'll say it again: A fun thing about Blendle is that it is open source. At least, the front-end is, and probably unintentionally. They left their Webpack source maps on the server [1]. Chrome automatically unpacks the source map into a directory structure in the 'sources' debug view. It's nice to see how they are building their React application. On two separate occasions, four months ago and a year ago, I've sent them an email about this, but never got a reply back. [1] https://www.blendle.com/js/app.js.map https://www.blendle.com/js/app.js.map

eveningcoffee 11y ago

I think that this kind of business model hides an threat unless anonymous payments are provided: you will completely loose your privacy as everything you read is now connected to your more or less real identity and actually nothing prevents them to serve you the ads, especially because you are now identified better than before. I think this is also the reason why Apple installed the ad-blocker - they want to enter into this market and grow it as it appears that ad-based business model is not working for them.

singletonaccnt 11y ago
Yes, I also find this really concerning.. I use Blendle to look up articles relating to pedophilia, to see how it's portrayed in the media. Now Blendle is giving away €2,50 on signup, so I can create new accounts as I go along... but I really wouldn't want to connect my regular account with it, and I would for my usage, but there really is no way to do it. If you're wondering how the subject is portrayed... very badly. Almost always the molester stereotype, especially in British media. You might want to read up on these threads if you want to get a better picture: - https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/18782/what-should-i-do-if-my-15-year-old-son-is-sexually-interested-in-younger-boys https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/18782/what-sho... - https://www.quora.com/Pedophilia/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-a-pedophile-1/answer/Ben-Kirssen https://www.quora.com/Pedophilia/What-does-it-feel-like-to-b...

Shivetya 11y ago

With the thirty percent cut they leave a big opportunity for others to step in. While the music industry may have little choice when iTunes made its debut there are far more sources of journalism and many of those have well developed web based outlets. How well does this product do with independents? Tech has opened the door for everyone to be a journalist and perhaps through a tool like this some could get more exposure? To be honest, with good web familiarity I don't need an aggregator for news. I don't even care for Apple's attempt which in itself my impact Blendle

kriro 11y ago

If this works (the cynic in me feels people don't read anymore), and the numbers that I've heard through the rumor mill indicate it does with about 100-150k paying users with decent return payments + a 30%, it might be a decent attack vector into the dreaded academic publishing landscape eventually. Their 30$/article fees are just a tad bit on the ridiculous side.