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Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
- haneefmubarak 11y agoHave you guys considered a Spotify style subscription model? Say, where I as a reader would pay a fixed monthly fee but would then be able to read as many articles as I wanted from the various sources you guys support throughout the month? Of course, the fees would be split across the publishers proportional to the time or number of articles I read from each. If you have, what were some of the pros and cons you saw in something like that?
- alexandernl 11y agoFounder of Blendle here. We have, but newspaper publishers don't like this idea. They're too afraid offering a monthly fee will result in a lot of cancelled subscriptions. And subscriptions are a big part of their revenue.
- allendoerfer 11y agoThis model would incentives click-baiting again.
- jacques_chester 11y agoI disagree. I think that it would incentivise repeat visitors -- commenters on Reddit, for example, or regulars on a forum. Blendle's model is better for pure consumption, not for interaction. Disclaimer: I am working on what will be a competitor.
- jacques_chester 11y ago> Of course, the fees would be split across the publishers proportional to the time or number of articles I read from each. 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.
- girvo 11y ago> taxi fare problem Do you mind expanding on that?
- jacques_chester 11y agoI poked around on Google, can't find where I first saw the term. Many people prefer fixed prices to pay-by-use. Taxis are paid-by-use, but in some cities you can pay a fixed fee to be taken to the airport. Even if people are told and shown that the fixed fee costs more, many will pick it over a regular fare structure because it is fixed. For the same reason many people pay for phone data they don't need and so on. The value comes from not needing to consider the price once it has been paid. Some micropayment schemes always had the sense that one was potentially running up a huge bill; Tipjoy had this problem.
- jrnkntl 11y agoElinea* (also in the Netherlands) offers a Spotify subscription style model for readers (next to a pay-per-article model) but they seem to be more focused on magazines than newspapers. I figure this has to do with the reasoning mentioned by alexandernl. * http://www.elinea.nl/ http://www.elinea.nl/
- reitanqild 11y agoOne disadvantage to this that I hven't seen anyone else mention is the Netflix problem: 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.
- bachmeier 11y agoThis is something I've wanted for years. I wish I knew the price though. There is a tendency to overshoot on the price initially and the result is turning off most of the potential market.
- alexandernl 11y agoArticles cost between €0,10 and €0,30 for newspaper articles. Between €0,20 and €0,40 for magazine articles.
- reyntjesr 11y agoNot quite true. I paid €0,75 for a magazine article saturday.
- alexandernl 11y agoTrue. Some really long articles can cost up to €0,79
- walterbell 11y agoWhat's the word count threshold for the higher price?
- alexandernl 11y agoPublishers decide.
- walterbell 11y agoDoes the purchase price include user rights comparable to other digital content, like ebooks? E.g. can the article be downloaded for offline reading or searching?
- jurre 11y agoI'm not sure about the specific legalities (I'm a developer at Blendle) but our iOS client offers offline support and we integrate with services like Pocket.
- birger 11y agoI'm one of the 'didn't pay for newspapers before' and right now spend a couple of euro's a month on Blendle. 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.
- michaelchisari 11y agoYou 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.
- JeanMertz 11y agoIt's also something we are very proud of. 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.
- kriro 11y agoThis data is also extremly valuable for journalists. I can envision someone becoming a better journalist by optimizing for lower refunds. A good journalist will use this as a weapon. Quite often you can't really be sure about the quality of your piece. Now you have an interesting data point.
- the_ed 11y agoIndeed. If Blendle continues to be successful this could get very interesting though. As described in the article linked here, it's a great metric. And their publishers will also start to use their metric. So -while they now describe the Blendle-revenue as an extra- this will actually change the way we deal with the 'print' data which is now accessible online, creating a new dynamic. This will surely have an impact on the print version of these magazines as well, I can imagine, making Blendle a content driver(shaper?) and not 'just' a source of 'extra revenue' as they tend to see it now. If it all takes off impact will, imho, be different than we can probably predict now, even though we can make some estimates of possible directions. Some people will be happier with the results after -say- five years than others. Time will tell.
- walterbell 11y agoGood to see this data point: "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."
- mvdwoord 11y agoMuch like birger, I never paid for any of the 'paywalled' news outlets before. Mostly due to the terrible user experience, t&c, and lack of content (often single newspaper/magazine). Even though I find most content in newspapers not even worth reading, let alone paying for. I do really want to pay for some high quality articles and Blendle makes this possible. 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!
- alexandernl 11y agoThanks for the nice words and comments! Working on that!
- furyg3 11y agoBefore Blendle I only used paywalled sites that I had a physical subscription for. It was horrible (only the economist worked as expected). Watching magazines and newspapers implement their own solutions was just painful... some Dutch newspapers did an awful job with apps. Newsweek also had a hilariously user experience as they kept switching their strategy. Blendle provides both an excellent user experience and a good solution to content providers who should really not be making their own apps.
- gabeochoa 11y agoWould like to see this process taken across the web. As someone who doesn't read news articles too often I don't mind paying but can't justify a subscription.
- TylerE 11y agoWhy do startups keep thinking micropayments is a thing people want?
- KJasper 11y agoThere isn't a consumer that really wants this, but publishers don't want all you can read models. So this is what we get.
- manicdee 11y agoBecause people (with money to spend on journalism) want a way to pay for just the articles they like. 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.
- willlma 11y agoBecause people consume a lot of little things. Ads are essentially involuntary micro-payments. It's a way of aligning the interests of content-creators and with their users rather than their sponsors. What's wrong with micro-payments?
- hobs 11y ago> What's wrong with micro-payments? 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.
- willlma 11y ago> they are generally used to extract more revenue from the existing model instead of supplant existing incomes Blendle is doing the latter and I would only argue for micro-payments in this context. > If your domicile had the ability to charge every time you go to the restroom, I guarantee they would just raise the rates Going to the bathroom is something you need to do, not something you choose to do, and the friction of finding another bathroom every time you want to is quite high. Reading articles is by no means a need and free alternatives are a button tap away. You're comparing one of the most demand inelastic services with an incredibly elastic one. They will never be able to extract unfair prices because readers will simply stop reading. So I agree that micro-payments have their place, and that place is the digital world where we consume many small things that we could do without if we thought that they were too expensive. The world that most of HN lives and breathes. But to write off micro-payments entirely is short-sighted. As for your original question, the reason a lot of people think that micro-payments are something that people want is probably because of Jaron Lanier's book, Who Owns the Future. It's a good read.
- icemelt8 11y agoThis is very very beautiful. As a owner of an Auto Industry Magazine in Pakistan. I would love this, since my magazine subscriptions are going down. And my site isn't generating money.
- Rainymood 11y agoReally cool! As a dutch student (econometrie) I do not / didn't know that anyone used this. Kind of silly since it was right under my nose. 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 ;)
- JeanMertz 11y agoWe're hiring! Send me a mail at jean[at]blendle[dot]com and I'll make sure it gets to the right person.
- kriro 11y agoThe model seems to work and they seem to have great traction. I can see all the objections but the proof is in the pudding. Really liked this sentence from their answer to a critic: """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 ;)
- phreeza 11y agoHere is an even crazier idea: (micro)pay to cite instead of (micro)pay to read. Just going to put that out there.
- kriro 11y agoThat's actually a pretty cool idea. Once there's infrastructure in place, it's easy to enforce, too. Turn in a paper and upon acceptance you are billed for the citations. Money = reputation also kind of works and is a nice incentive to write good papers that get cited often. [downside is obviously that it kind of also creates an incentive to cite less]
- ersii 11y agoYou mentioned you have plans for expanding internationally. Any comments on that? :-) (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!)
- JeanMertz 11y agoOther than "stay tuned", not really. If you're interested, visit https://launch.blendle.com https://launch.blendle.com and leave your email address. We'll let you know once we launch in Sweden :)
- funzoneq 11y agoWe are working on it. But we have to reach agreements with all individual publishers, which takes a lot of negotiations and time. We also need to reach 'a critical mass of publishers', before we can launch in a new country. 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.
- ersii 11y agoDoes that mean you're opening up account creation for the US, when that content has come around? Or would I, as a Swede be able to create an account and read (and pay) for the US content? (I guess I'm asking about 1) Account creation 2) Geographical restrictions)
- akavel 11y agoI'm not Dutch-speaking and tried registering -- successfully! There seem to be some purely English language articles/newspapers already there: I've found at least The Economist and WSJ/Wall Street Journal. Every new account seems to get free 2.50 EUR credit on start; later you can apparently pay with PayPal or credit card. (Note however, that I haven't actually tested reading any article or paying yet.) To create an account you have to "read" some Dutch -- but some common sense + Google Translate was enough for me to get through. [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...
- JeanMertz 11y agoAwesome that you got it working. We are working on launching an English version in the near future. 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.
- recursify 11y agoGreat idea - I'm happy to pay $50-$100 a year on good journalism, I just don't know where I want to spend that money and on what type of articles. The one click pay and refund policy sounds good. Can't wait until you get more North American publications :)
- phreeza 11y agoI feel like the 'no questions asked' (or 'one question asked' as akavel points out) refund is really the killer feature here. It aligns incentives for journalists and outlets correctly, provides a feedback loop, and it also lowers the hesitation to pay, all at the same time.
- wouterinho 11y agoQuality of content in this way can be measured in these micropayments + refunds instead of points/votes. Down with clickbait articles and up with good content. 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.
- bewo001 11y agoWhat? Newspapers actually doing innovative things instead of suing Google or pressing politicians into passing ridiculous bills to preserve their old business model?
- Plantagehouder 11y agoMany dutch newspapers (nrc,ad,trouw,etc) offer student discounts on their subscriptions. Do you guys have any plans for something similar?
- JeanMertz 11y agoSorry, no student discounts in our plans right now. But this is a very interesting idea. You can however couple your existing newspaper subscriptions with Blendle, giving you access to all of their articles in our kiosk.
- tinco 11y agoJust want to add something to the conversation about The Netherlands. A cool thing about this startup is that one of its founders (alexandernl here on HN) is a celebrity in The Netherlands. I would guess if you'd go to a random Dutch street and show people his picture, 7/10 adults would recognize him. Alexander is a frequent guest who explains tech products at one of the NL's most hot prime time shows, he's basically the person who explains what an iPhone app is to everyone over 30 in the Netherlands (assuming everyone under 30 already knew). 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.
- alper 11y agoThis might be one of the cases where being in a small country is useful. You can get significant coverage to validate a model quickly before exporting it internationally.