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Comment by cJ0th | Hacker News Reader

It is an interesting idea and I look forward to see how this will turn out. I just explored it a bit and so far the implementation seems solid. However, I reckon that I will probably loose interest very soon because the more I ask myself: "Is this really worht xx cent?" the more I will conclude that reading most articles is just a waste of time.

I think it will take some time to figure out what kind of articles and which audience this platform is actually for.

My hope is that it will find a way to make labor/ cost intense journalism more economically viable and thus promote it but as of now magazines publish too many low effort pieces. An extreme example: the WSJ's "Habbits of highly productive people" costs 39 cents. I read it and if anything somebody should pay ME 39 cents for wasting my time. ;)

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The article price points are always so bizarre. The whole paper is $1.50 or $2 and they want 40c for 1 article?

This is an extremely difficult nut to crack but Blendle's is the best approach I have seen so far.

I think success will rely upon brand name content, a good preview so buyers know what they're getting, the auto-refund thing and 10-50c pricing per article.

You would need cost per article to be about (cost of paper)/(typical number of articles someone needs to buy the paper) to maintain revenue.

So this should be a lot higher than (cost of paper)/(number of articles)

Not sure that 40c is right, mind you, just that you can't really compare it to the total number of articles, if most people don't read most of them.

Blendle's founder here. Pricing is something that we're going to experiment with. Nobody knows what the willingness to pay for journalism, yet. So we're going to figure that out.

I think it'll always be a mix between micropayments and subscriptions: micropayments if you only read a little, subscriptions if you read a lot from a specific title.

I wish you luck, this is a hard nut to crack.

I don't think people should pay for journalism. They should pay for journalists.

What do I mean?

The benefits that we get from journalism are maximized if we have expert journalists – people who dedicate their lives to being good journalists.

Good journalists need stability. If they depend on the readership rates for individual articles, they are disencentivized to take the kinds of risks that a stable institution can afford to give them.

I don't know Blendle's long term plans in terms of supporting quality journalism – but the micropayment model is at odds with giving stability to individual journalists.

Hopefully this is something your are thinking about. How can we best support journalists – and not just individual peices of journalism?

(not the person you replied to)

I think you're right. I can't believe I never thought of like that before.

This is the sort of thing someone like Blendle could choose to do. After all, just because content is payed by the piece doesn't mean content creators must be.

This makes sense. What you get with most magazines/newspapers works as a bundling discount, basically.

Let's say you buy an issue of the NYT. Are you actually going to read every bit of it, or are you going to focus on the articles that particularly interest you, skim the headlines for sections that are less important, and so on? If you only have to pay for what you read, suddenly the paper is making a lot less money.

Most popular media out there that people want you to pay money for is simply not of any value to modern consumers, you can easily do without it and you are not rewarded for reading it in any way more than reading any of the other stuff available for free.

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