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Comment by Fej | Hacker News Reader

Until I read this comment section I didn't know Blendle existed. It physically disturbs me. Literally, as in I have this pit in my stomach.

If it takes off, it will kill journalism, at least on the Internet. I don't think I'm exaggerating much. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the like would suddenly have a tremendous pressure to write clickbaity articles at the expense of substantive ones. I presume they would be fact-checked clickbaity articles, but clickbait nonetheless.

This type of business model is all but certainly not fit for traditional news content. What do you think will get to the top, top 10 lists - or more informative but ultimately less widely exciting news stories?

On a side note, L2 did a short Winners & Losers segment about how news companies made huge mistakes in the online world. It's an interesting little watch:

https://youtu.be/YbolmT6s5Xc

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> If it takes off, it will kill journalism, at least on the Internet. I don't think I'm exaggerating much. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the like would suddenly have a tremendous pressure to write clickbaity articles

What makes you think that this isn't the case already? I work in this industry and I can tell you for a fact that none of those organizations are News organizations anymore. They are traffic brokers. Some of their authors still have integrity, but the organizations themselves don't care about quality. All they want is traffic. Pure and simple!

I think they'd have pressure not to write clickbait articles.

At present, clickbait works because it makes money by driving ad impressions. Many readers don't even mind wasting time on such content, and those who do quickly move on. The downside to the publications churning out clickbait is minimal, because the readers have little investment in the product.

But once people are paying their own money to read articles (even a nominal amount), their attitude to clickbait will change. After they've been burned a couple of times by a particular outlet, they won't pay them for any more of their articles. But they will return to those outlets that provide value for money.

Presumably, most people will still stick to low quality but free sources, but I think there's a potentially substantial market for high quality content, if the price is right.

The big question is, will the amount people are willing to pay cover the costs? Real journalism can be expensive.

> tremendous pressure to write clickbaity articles a

Au contraire : if you don't like the article, Blendle has a very fast and easy way to reclaim your money.

So this will actually encourage better journalism.

Users won't do this en masse. They're betting on it.

Yes, and I would add that we probably don't want an "App store for news", which would mean a single gatekeeper, and we would eventually pay a tax on our news. Also, they could build a database of our reading behavior, which would be worse than the cross-site user-tracking cookies of today.

I disagree.

1) NYT, WSJ and Economist are one of the few orgs that can actually get away with a paywall. They might just sit behind a regular paywall even if pay-per-click were the norm.

2) Other news orgs are driven by ads - ergo their income is tied to clicks already. So they're already highly incentivized to produce click-bait.

3) If news orgs can actually make more money - they will produce less click-bait. They are 'for profit' but staffed almost entirely by people that want to do 'real news'. There are almost no serious editors who actually want to do 'click bait'. They do it because they are forced to by terrible economic conditions.

I've been using blendle for quite a while now. But I don't use it very often yet.

Mostly when people on twitter, or other social media, share articles which are behind paywalls, I check if it's available for reading on blendle. This way I can read a lot of stuff behind paywalls and even immediately get my money back if the article was bad.

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