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WhatsApp showed us that running a paid, low cost, privacy oriented service can be profitable. I'd probably pay for that, again, as soon as they were completely

WhatsApp showed us that running a paid, low cost, privacy oriented service can be profitable. I'd probably pay for that, again, as soon as they were completely untied from Facebook and had apologized. (Yep, they made a very public promise.) I'd probably pay similar or slightly larger amounts for a number of other things as well (actually I do, so my point is rather that I'd pay for for stuff :) Now before anyone thinks: "great, lets paywall all the things!" here's an important catch: 1. I'm happy to pay for my newspaper. I'm happy to buy the occasional newspaper on a newspaper stand. I do not want to subscribe to every newspaper that anyone shares a link to, just to read one single thing that is relevant to me. I love the idea of blendle but it seems media (and my feeling is even a lot of HNers) don't get it. 2. I'm happy to pay a certain large cloud company that I don't like as much as I used to do for an increased storage quota. I'm happy to pay reasonable amounts for apps, services etc. I'm happy to pay for usage for things I use less often. I particularly like the Jetbrains model of pay-to-own (even if I personally prefer their competitors products. ;-) I still do not want every app to pretend they are a service that I should pay a monthly fee for. Also: I don't really mind relevant ads. The other day I actually clicked on one. Because it was relevant. But there is no reason to track me around the web: most ads I ever clicked on voluntarily (that would be 5 - 10 for the last 10 years ;-) could probably be inferred from context: I was reading a blog post about something related or searching for something related. Also (and here I go against many HNers), ads should preferably be injected server side.

Schaulustiger 8y ago
Blendle is nice in theory but their article pricing is really off-putting. I know that it's the publisher's choice to set prices for individual articles, but I'm not going to pay half of the actual paper price to read one single article. I use it to read a select few things that I'm really interested in, but I'd love it to be more of an individual aggregation of stuff (think Flipbook) where I don't mind reading lots of articles because they're essentially cheap enough for me to not care. Not going to do that, though, when a 300 word article costs up to 1€.
- eitland 8y ago
  That's sad to hear. (Not using Blendle on a daily basis.) I was always waiting for more articles to get available on Blendle, but if pricing is going through the roof it will be harder to recommend.
  - mercer 8y ago
    I'd love to be able to support individual authors, or 'collectives', regardless of where they publish. I suppose that's hard for Blendle to arrange though.

Schaulustiger 8y ago

Blendle is nice in theory but their article pricing is really off-putting. I know that it's the publisher's choice to set prices for individual articles, but I'm not going to pay half of the actual paper price to read one single article. I use it to read a select few things that I'm really interested in, but I'd love it to be more of an individual aggregation of stuff (think Flipbook) where I don't mind reading lots of articles because they're essentially cheap enough for me to not care. Not going to do that, though, when a 300 word article costs up to 1€.

eitland 8y ago
That's sad to hear. (Not using Blendle on a daily basis.) I was always waiting for more articles to get available on Blendle, but if pricing is going through the roof it will be harder to recommend.
- mercer 8y ago
  I'd love to be able to support individual authors, or 'collectives', regardless of where they publish. I suppose that's hard for Blendle to arrange though.