8 ms·

How do they win if they end up making less money? What you are paying for is journalists doing research every month to produce those articles so you could acces

How do they win if they end up making less money? What you are paying for is journalists doing research every month to produce those articles so you could access them on demand. If you want that on demand access you need to pay them for the work they do every month not the work they do one off.

godot 8y ago
I think the idea is instead of having 1 user pay you $30 a month, you have 10 users (or more) paying you $3 a month, you end up with a net win (even at equivalent of $30 a month of revenue because now you've had more eyeballs). The problem is most publishers still don't necessarily believe this model or think it'll work, or think it's too risky. Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and essentially required little work from the publishers themselves to integrate (Blendle devs did most of the work to import the content, publishers just had to agree), and the Blendle solution doesn't "rock the boat" for these publishers, i.e. doesn't change existing users on their web site's behaviors.
- lajhsdfkl 8y ago
  > I think the idea is instead of having 1 user pay you $30 a month, you have 10 users (or more) paying you $3 a month, you end up with a net win Intuitively, I believe it's much easier to find one person to pay you $30 a month for quality journalism than to find 10 people to pay $3 a month. Neither of us have data to back our assertions but my argument is that the people that care about and read quality journalism are well off people and the marginal cost of paying $10 or $30 a month is not significant for them. >Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and essentially required little work from the publishers themselves to integrate I've never heard of blendle until reading the comments in this topic but just as a comparison, the WSJ has 1,270,000 digital subscribers paying $45 a month. Blendle has 550,000 users.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
They win because they make more money. One of the challenges is that if you look at this as a single consumer / single producer model it is very hard to see the economics. That is why internet advertising is also hard to see sometimes. Nearly everyone I know tells me "How do they make any money on internet ads? I never click on them." And for lots of people that is true, but for another population it is not true. And when you look at page views as a 'population' of say a million different people, and 1% of them, or 10,000 of them click on an advertisement that pays $0.10 per click, that is $1,000 of revenue from that one article. And if the marginal cost to host a single article on a web site is $1 per month, there is tremendous leverage there. So this model insures that nearly everybody that reads and article has paid a small amount. This is more reliable income than Internet Ads even with 99% of the readers not clicking. And the article lives forever, and as we see on this web site some articles get cycled through popularity again and again every couple of years. People who have blog sites and track metrics see this effect when someone puts them on Reddit (for example). A static article page can service a lot of page views with very little hardware. Nginx on a current server can serve the same article up at 50,000 page views per second if there is enough network bandwidth and the article is on an SSD. Hosting costs go up when you add a bunch of dynamic content but much of that can be hosted on CDNs and distributed to the edge. Done with any mount of care and planning and it costs little to host material on the web.
- lajhsdfkl 8y ago
  >They win because they make more money. You have no data to back any of your hand wavy assertions. You are not smarter than the people that decide the business model for these publications. People are not willing to pay 10 or 20 cents to read articles that they clicked on a whim. We already know this from the app economy.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    Actually I have quite a bit of experience around this. I've been working on understanding the economics of information since the mid 90's when I helped start an online web magazine about golf of all things. With the help of some grad students at Berkeley's Haas School of business we came up with the core mechanisms about how information can gain value and how it can lose that value. Also a number of ways to capture that value without destroying it in the process. The marketing person from that web property went on to Apple where they instituted the 99 cents per song music model that came to dominate music sales. The arguments against are familiar, "We sell an album not a song because those songs that aren't hits won't support their production costs.", "All songs will be tailored to sales and music quality will suffer.", "Labels (and by trickle down Artists) will make less because even buying 3 songs is less than they would get buying one $15 album." Instead the music industry flourished in the new system and more people got to experience more music more easily than ever before. It isn't a question of smart or not smart, it is understanding that the economics of goods models we developed during the industrial revolution are not directly translatable to the economics of information. I've been a fan of Blendle from the start because based on my research to date, I knew that if they could be operationally efficient enough, they would be able to facilitate per article transactions in an iTunes like model. And if they could do that it would have a larger impact than iTunes did on music. They continue to hum along and I continue to use them for that. The "App" market is interesting because as I characterized information, Apps don't qualify, rather they contain algorithms. Because of that, their value is created through novelty rather than being intrinsic.

godot 8y ago

I think the idea is instead of having 1 user pay you $30 a month, you have 10 users (or more) paying you $3 a month, you end up with a net win (even at equivalent of $30 a month of revenue because now you've had more eyeballs). The problem is most publishers still don't necessarily believe this model or think it'll work, or think it's too risky. Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and essentially required little work from the publishers themselves to integrate (Blendle devs did most of the work to import the content, publishers just had to agree), and the Blendle solution doesn't "rock the boat" for these publishers, i.e. doesn't change existing users on their web site's behaviors.

lajhsdfkl 8y ago
> I think the idea is instead of having 1 user pay you $30 a month, you have 10 users (or more) paying you $3 a month, you end up with a net win Intuitively, I believe it's much easier to find one person to pay you $30 a month for quality journalism than to find 10 people to pay $3 a month. Neither of us have data to back our assertions but my argument is that the people that care about and read quality journalism are well off people and the marginal cost of paying $10 or $30 a month is not significant for them. >Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and essentially required little work from the publishers themselves to integrate I've never heard of blendle until reading the comments in this topic but just as a comparison, the WSJ has 1,270,000 digital subscribers paying $45 a month. Blendle has 550,000 users.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

They win because they make more money. One of the challenges is that if you look at this as a single consumer / single producer model it is very hard to see the economics. That is why internet advertising is also hard to see sometimes. Nearly everyone I know tells me "How do they make any money on internet ads? I never click on them." And for lots of people that is true, but for another population it is not true. And when you look at page views as a 'population' of say a million different people, and 1% of them, or 10,000 of them click on an advertisement that pays $0.10 per click, that is $1,000 of revenue from that one article. And if the marginal cost to host a single article on a web site is $1 per month, there is tremendous leverage there. So this model insures that nearly everybody that reads and article has paid a small amount. This is more reliable income than Internet Ads even with 99% of the readers not clicking. And the article lives forever, and as we see on this web site some articles get cycled through popularity again and again every couple of years. People who have blog sites and track metrics see this effect when someone puts them on Reddit (for example). A static article page can service a lot of page views with very little hardware. Nginx on a current server can serve the same article up at 50,000 page views per second if there is enough network bandwidth and the article is on an SSD. Hosting costs go up when you add a bunch of dynamic content but much of that can be hosted on CDNs and distributed to the edge. Done with any mount of care and planning and it costs little to host material on the web.

lajhsdfkl 8y ago
>They win because they make more money. You have no data to back any of your hand wavy assertions. You are not smarter than the people that decide the business model for these publications. People are not willing to pay 10 or 20 cents to read articles that they clicked on a whim. We already know this from the app economy.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Actually I have quite a bit of experience around this. I've been working on understanding the economics of information since the mid 90's when I helped start an online web magazine about golf of all things. With the help of some grad students at Berkeley's Haas School of business we came up with the core mechanisms about how information can gain value and how it can lose that value. Also a number of ways to capture that value without destroying it in the process. The marketing person from that web property went on to Apple where they instituted the 99 cents per song music model that came to dominate music sales. The arguments against are familiar, "We sell an album not a song because those songs that aren't hits won't support their production costs.", "All songs will be tailored to sales and music quality will suffer.", "Labels (and by trickle down Artists) will make less because even buying 3 songs is less than they would get buying one $15 album." Instead the music industry flourished in the new system and more people got to experience more music more easily than ever before. It isn't a question of smart or not smart, it is understanding that the economics of goods models we developed during the industrial revolution are not directly translatable to the economics of information. I've been a fan of Blendle from the start because based on my research to date, I knew that if they could be operationally efficient enough, they would be able to facilitate per article transactions in an iTunes like model. And if they could do that it would have a larger impact than iTunes did on music. They continue to hum along and I continue to use them for that. The "App" market is interesting because as I characterized information, Apps don't qualify, rather they contain algorithms. Because of that, their value is created through novelty rather than being intrinsic.