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>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

>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.

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.