They also send out a mail twice a day with headlining stories. There's almost always at least on story that interests me.
Blendle really is the ideal tool for me. I don't have a problem paying for quality content, but don't make me take out an XX$ subscription just to read one article every now and then.
If you're reading 'De Correspondent' you will see a lot of examples of this: the headlines are not necessary clickbait in the same way as BuzzFeed is, but they still over-promise and are often slightly misleading. Especially the ones they share via social media.
I use Blendle nearly every day, so far I only got good and interesting articles, a lot from newspapers I have not read before.
I think Internet 'journalism' is at an all time low.
I'm going to be more careful to click on things
So you are adapting to this state of horribleness by determining for every link if it's clickbait or not. I wish that wouldn't be necessary.
You can add yourself to our beta invite list at https://launch.blendle.com. We're really looking forward to next year!
Let me know if you have any questions.
The service looks very interesting, and I look forward to trying it.
Re: Do you require users to purchase a certain number of credits up front after the trial?
The "trial" is really $2,50 that we give you upon signup. You get another $2,50 after your first "top up". We show the prices in your own currency, so no "credits", but top-ups start at $5, and go up from there. You can choose to auto-topup when your wallet drops below $0.
Re: I see you offer refunds if you don't like the story. What prevents a person from just reading all they like and then asking for a refund?
The refund mechanism is an important tool to generate trust with the reader. We don't want you to feel "nickel-and-dimed" and if publisher promised a certain article through the heading and intro, but didn't live up to those expectations after reading the article, we encourage you to refund, and tell the publishers why you asked a refund (through a dialog), so publishers can learn as well.
We have certain mechanisms in place to prevent abuse of this system, but we're lenient, and in general we see only about 10% of purchases are refunded this way.
Re: Is it possible to copy and paste text from the articles to share on social media? (I assume you have a share mechanism, but this is more specific).
You can. Again, it's built on a mutual-trust system. So far it has worked out great, if we ever notice the balance tipping, we'll have to tweak the system.
Re: Once I pay for the article, does it stay in my account forever, or could it be pulled by the publisher?
It does stay in your account. We don't have any mechanism to actually remove articles from our platform. Highly occasionally, we remove the content of an article, because it was published by accident (f.e. a newspaper delivering next days newspaper too early, and it containing the score of a pre-recorded contest).
Blendle's got a lot of hype behind it, I wonder if it's really taking of.
The line I hear out of Blendle though is that it's part of an ecosystem, i.e. one avenue of payment options. I can imagine a one-off paywall working for some content, but I doubt it will be the dominant method of choice.
Newspapers are only half entertainment, but the entertainment industry pivoted from per-product to aggregated subscription in the age of the Internet. Of course Blendle itself is a platform, tweaking its business model should be within scope.
If I was in that industry I could see the potential value paying for that gives, but as someone who just has a passing interest there is no way I'd pay for that. I'd consider maybe paying $1 or $2 to watch them (although the quality of the free videos was very hit and miss, so even that I think might be a bit high), but that's it. In the end I just found some (free) talks on YouTube about the same topic.
Personally I think talks from conferences should be released for free online. Other than headline speakers, most of the people who give talks at conferences just get paid for their travel costs and accomodation (if that). The real value in going to a conference is for the networking, so people will still pay to go - I'd like to see the knowledge shared released for everyone to benefit.
For NYT/WSJ, I could see up to 50c/article. Medium maybe 25c. The Information/Pando possibly up to $1.
"Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers"
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...
Last November, in a rather blunt way, I expressed my reservations regarding Blendle’s model (see The New York Times and Springer Are Wrong About Blendle[1]). My concerns ranged from the abundance of free content available on the web (especially in English), to the damage inflicted on the “cross-subsidy model” in which baseball coverage pays for the Kabul bureau, to the risk associated with the “unbundling” of news (and its impact of publishers’ ARPU).
To their credit, Blendle’s co-founders Alexander Klöpping and Marten Blankesteijn seized on my questioning and engaged me in an ongoing discussion focusing on business models that could ensure the survival of quality journalism. This could be a crucial factor in Blendle’s fate: this company has been created by journalists who fervently defend quality journalism and believe that great editorial must be paid for. In spite of my initial reluctance, the more I explored its model, the more I came to believe it should be tested and carefully analyzed, essentially because it is much more sophisticated and carries more potential that a first look might lead one to believe.
[0]: http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/10/05/blendle-is-up-to-someth...
[1]: http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/11/02/the-new-york-times-and-...
Please remember that these background articles often require months of research and journalists going abroad. These types of in-depth articles are hard to get on most blogs and/or free news sites.
Without these in-depth articles, our news consumption would be very shallow. This is what triggers people to pay for articles on Blendle, they want to be informed, they want to know more about a subject and/or event that recently happened. They probably already _know_ that it happened and what the end result was, but now they are interested in _why_ it happened and _how_ the end result came to be.
