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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want.

The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles).

Now the pay per article model works so much better. You can charge me to read a single article but I pay nothing if I read nothing. This is the model that blendle.com uses and my experience was that even though their "per article" price was much higher than I originally thought reasonable (9 cents to 50 cents) I was paying basically $50 a month for subscriptions to the publications that I read (WSJ, Economist, NYT, WaPo, etc) and with Blendle I end up putting maybe $15 or $25 per month into my Blendle wallet. So its half as expensive for me and I still get to read, advertising free, any article in those publications. Blendle's money back if its click bait policy is the clincher. When you read a lemon you get your money back.

I win (save money) they win (they get paid for their journalism).

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One con of the pay per article is that it siphons money into the money making kinds of stories. The sports and celebrity pages can do a lot of funding for the slow grind investigations that are important for holding those in power accountable.

It’s not like an a la carte model couldn’t also fund profitless journalism, but I think it might push things even more in that direction.

I think they do understand what people want, but they have a healthy, eat your vegetables kind of take on things too.

There's no reason why a publication can't charge more for an in-depth piece. I'd gladly pay far more for a comprehensive exposé.

How will you know it's a comprehensive exposé? How will you evaluate whether an article is going to be worth the price?

> How will you know it's a comprehensive exposé?

How about before I purchase there's an excerpt and the number of words that lay ahead? I mean, it couldn't be that hard to distinguish comprehensive articles vs the norm.

> How will you evaluate whether an article is going to be worth the price?

I wouldn't know. And if it wasn't worth it, I probably wouldn't purchase a future piece from the same reporter. That said, there could be a review system. (Just brainstorming here)

This model already exists with those damned "click here to continue reading buttons". Just charge me a few pennies when I click that button and we're good. Give me a little browser based wallet that I can re-up with my "news" budget on a regular basis and I'm a happy paying customer.

Charge me $30/month to read your site at all (bloomberg) and you're never making a cent off of me again.

The same way you used to evaluate the dead tree news. You trust the brand and its editors.

Blendle offers automated instant refunds. If the article is bad, refund it.

I think the new economy, some CEOs and CFOs will make terrible decisions, and lose their market share to those who provide the right price for the value, or understand what the value even is.

or just read the other news paper's summary of it after an hour or two.

Actually I am more likely to pay for investigations than for gossip.

We're the minority.

I would think we would be the majority here though?

Edit: also, and this goes to the person upthread, even if mainstream media goes for gossip I'd still think we should make up a nice niche?

I don't think this is right. Even if a site goes for a subscription model, it will still be obvious which pages people click the most on, and so they will have a strong incentive to increase sports and celebrity reporting to bolster their subscriber count. The exact same incentives are there with pay-by-page. You still have to charge enough for your writers to eat, and you have the exact same incentive to tell them to write clickbait.

When I am paying by the article, I personally am much less likely to pay to see garbage stories.

I don't think that model will work, honestly. There's friction anytime you ask someone to spend anything, even if the price is de minimis.

Look what happens whenever a city adopts a $0.05 plastic bag tax. When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel.

I'd expect prompting users to choose whether reading a story is worth $0.05 to them every time will cause them to read and engage significantly less.

That's not a great example. You can buy your own plastic bags for 1 cent a piece on amazon.

> I'd expect prompting users to choose whether reading a story is worth $0.05 to them every time will cause them to read and engage significantly less.

The example that gives me a little bit of optimism in the long run is power: people don't really have a problem with the fact that their power bill is pay-per-use, and if it discourages them from unduly wasting power, all the better.

But the problem you describe is still significant: people are _already_ used to that dynamic for electricity, and it's not clear to me how to get over the hump where they'd treat micro transactions for publishing in the way you describe. Most people aren't remotely rational enough to realize on their own that stressing over each minuscule payment has a cost of its own and coming up with a better strategy for handling it. (In the electricity example, this is the difference between 1) calculating the power usage of each device in your house and considering whether you want to pay a few cents before flicking that light switch or 2) conserve in common sense ways and adjust if necessary based on your monthly bill.)

> When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel.

Case in point... This may be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. My city has had a ten cent bag tax for a long time now, and the way everyone reacts is 1) carry it in your hand if it's one or two small things, 2) pay a freaking dime if you have too much stuff and be slightly more likely to remember your reusable bag next time.

Electricity is different. The charge is decoupled from point of use. When you flip a light switch, it doesn't visibly and immediately bill you 2¢.

The bag tax, pay per article, etc. do.

Do you mean that the usage and the monthly bill are separated in time? I don't see why the pay per article couldn't work the same way. The bag tax example was ludicrous for a different reason: namely that carrying multiple loads in your arms is more than worth five cents for all but the absolutely poorest Americans.

Regarding bags, that's a strange reaction given that everywhere else I've heard of that introduced a bag tax has seen usage drop dramatically. It's not the price - clearly most people can afford what they charge - it's the psychology that makes you stop and think whether you really need a single use bag for what you've bought.

Oh I completely agree. It's extremely effective as a reminder and has been extremely effective in my city. I think it's great example of damn near Pareto-efficient govt policy.

But when I _do_ forget my reusable bag for whatever reason and have an unwieldy amount of stuff to carry, it would be beyond idiotic to ride that psychological effect all the way into the absurdity of stuffing my arms full of thing (I gather from the original comment I responded to that he wasn't talking about carrying an item or three).

> I don't think that model will work, honestly. There's friction anytime you ask someone to spend anything, even if the price is de minimis.

The price is so low that there is little friction. You also get a full refund if you are disappointed, further reducing friction.

Furthermore you don't pay every time but you pay from an account with Blendle.

Regarding bag tax, I have trouble believing this is more than your own anecdotal observations, do you have any sources to back up that claim? Most cities in Europe charge a lot more than 0.05 per bag (Austrian supermarkets generally charge between 0.25-1€) yet most people just bring their own. I buy the more expensive variant (cloth material) which survive about a year.

> which survive about a year

What are you doing with those? I have one reusable bag which is 11 years old now. I just throw it in the laundry about once a year and it's as good as new.

I use them for everything... they often end up as bags for recyclables (e.g. bottles, metal with sharp edges, paper) so they get chewed up fairly fast. Even if I only use them for exclusively shopping, I go 1-3x per week (~100 excursions/year) and when it's warm we throw a lot of BBQ parties so some of those trips are overloaded with heavy stuff which ends up cutting corners in the sides.

And then you have those magical psychological effects at different price points. I remember when almost every piece of "shareware" was $20+ and most full "programs" were $100+. Now people balk at apps over $0.99 and even opt to have a ton of their personal information sent off to a stranger to avoid that price.

The tone of the engagement matters, too, because it works on psychological levels most people aren't aware of. It's essentially brainwashing. To me, "Buying" means assessing and confirming value, "Upgrading" means reassessing the value and how relevant the new features are to me, and "Renewing a subscription" means to keep the status quo and automatically remain up to date. Upgrade notifications feel like nagging, while subscription renewal notices are almost alarming.

Nag all you want because I can just use what I have now. Yay! I upgraded and now all the icons are in different spots. Maybe they added something interesting. I hope it still reads my old files.

End the subscription and who knows what happens. Yay! I renewed my subscription and now all my most precious files are no longer in danger of being wiped from existence. Subscribing sure saved my butt. I'm so glad I did!

Overall, though, I think the subscription model exists to take advantage of inattentive customers, which makes up the bulk of any user base. A person forgetting to cancel their subscription is as good as a new subscriber and there are all sorts of situations where that can happen to anyone. Hell, those are probably the same customers that didn't notice when a new version was released, so the company even makes up for missed upgrades. I have no real data to back that up, but it fits with a lot of personal observations.

> Overall, though, I think the subscription model exists to take advantage of inattentive customers, which makes up the bulk of any user base.

This may be true for some services, but I don't think it's true of the most successful services. Think about Spotify and Netflix, most users are fully aware of their subscription.

> Now people balk at apps over $0.99 and even opt to have a ton of their personal information sent off to a stranger to avoid that price

Yes! This is extremely puzzling for me and I would love to know why it happens. I am mostly free from this and do not think about trying a $1 app any longer than I do about buying a cup of tea (and always pay for an ad-free version if I still using the app a week later).

However, I am in the minority: hearing this my friends roll their eyes "you are paying for an app you may not use long term? You must be rich. Look for a free app instead, man".

It would work if the model used preloaded crypto payments where all you had to do is see how many tokens something costs and have them deducted automatically by clicking the article read button.

UI is everything.

My purchase of <$2 apps in the Google Play store went up tremendously when I could do it with just a fingerprint read instead of a full password entry.

The amount of money I spend with Amazon's one-swipe checkout is obnoxious.

Ask me to give you my full address twice and manually enter a credit card, even if you have an item I really want? Nope, probably not doing it.

I feel terrible for all those companies which don’t analyze their shopping funnels. The simplest checkout experience should require the minimum friction. What ends up happening is that they want to collect ridiculous amount of customer data in the hopes they’ll use it some other day.

Those companies deserve to die.

If you could click a button that says "5¢ to Read" and have it work immediately, I think the problem would be solved. But this would either require some sort of browser-based wallet or a wider adoption of cryptocurrency.

There has been a LOT of effort put behind micro transactions for publishing, from companies that have all the resources and incentive in the world, like Google. The market simply doesn't want it. The average consumer isn't remotely rational enough to amortize a subscription cost and compare it to a unit cost. The way they process the incentives of a subscription is more like: "once you've reached the threshold where you consider the subscription worth it, completely forget about the fact that you're paying it for the purposes of assessing costs". Micro-transactions, even for tiny unit prices, feel like a cost upon every use.

You or I may prefer the microtransaction model to free with ads or subscription-based, but I suspect there's a lot about the market that we'd prefer was different, and that's because we're not typical of the market.

> There has been a LOT of effort put behind micro transactions for publishing, from companies that have all the resources and incentive in the world, like Google.

I feel I used to follow Google quite closely before and I cannot remember seing any hints of this.

My feeling has rather been that any form for paying has been looked at as second class compared to ads at that company.

Youtube Red still isn't available here and I haven't heard a thing about the idea they had last year that we could pay to avoid ads.

Do you have any pointers?

They tried several variations for Google Contributor, each less appealing than the last.

More recently they introduced Subscribe With Google.

I never got the chance to try.

Would anyone care to describe why it wasn't great?

(Short summary of why I think it should be great: I want to support the sites and blogs I read. I don't want ads as they are still next to useless.)

From looking at it, it seems like it's active only on a really tiny number of sites.

If I understand you correctly that means you'd pay but get ads anyway on most pages?

That would explain why it didn't succeed.

In fact it would seem like it was rigged to fail which wouldn't surprise me as both Google and Facebook seems to prefer ad revenue over payments.

> both Google and Facebook seems to prefer ad revenue over payments.

This is exactly the kind of conspiracy-theory mindset I was talking about in my upthread comment. What reason could they have for preferring ads, given the extra risks (esp legislative) and PR issues associated with it?

As I said, Google (I can't personally speak to Facebook) has put effort behind getting micropayments off the ground in a couple different formats, but there're substantial hurdles and substantial pushback on the part of publishers. The fact that they're not jeopardizing existing revenue by forcing pubs to do things they don't want to doesn't mean that they prefer advertising revenue per se.

Thanks for your reply. It was really interesting.

> This is exactly the kind of conspiracy-theory mindset I was talking about in my upthread comment.

This is however unneccessary IMO. Im referring to observed behaviour. I might be wrong but calling it a conspiracy-theory mindset doesn't help.

> What reason could they have for preferring ads, given the extra risks (esp legislative) and PR issues associated with it?

I don't know but if I had to guess Googles infrastructure and organization is heavily optimized for it.

> As I said, Google (I can't personally speak to Facebook) has put effort behind getting micropayments off the ground in a couple different formats, but there're substantial hurdles and substantial pushback on the part of publishers.

Ok, so now we are finally talking.

So the reason I couldn't "buy the ad spots" and sponsor writers of tech blogs (and here I'm referring to personal blogs, not news outlets dressed up as one) was because "publishers"?

Do we really think blog owners with google ads would complain if parts of their revenue came from users who hadn't had to suffer ads?

I can see one issue here and that is a lot of sites would probably try double dipping by trying to install a second ad network.

I'm honest but a bit annoyed here: I guess it is because Google used to be focused on creating good products for me but now it is about whatever publishers want.

Edit: also this doesn't explain Google's hesitation to introduce Youtube red, does it? Or are publishers also active in deciding what Google does on their own properties too?

Conceptually it's exactly what you'd want, but sites had to opt-in to "some weird experiment" instead of Google rolling upgrading their adsense TOS for a year, and then rolling this out on all sites that use adsense.

The reasons it's stuck in infancy, then, is the list of sites which support it which is here: https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995

(Linked to from https://contributor.google.com/ )

There are about two dozen sites, and even then the only one I even recognize is tvtropes.

Eep, I may have inadvertently been referring to information about internal trials. Suffice it to say that a public offering isn't the first step to trying out a product direction, nor is it the only way to get feedback from the market (given that a tried and failed public product incurs substantial costs).

EDIT: thanks to the downthread comment, I see that the pilot I was thinking of apparently became Contributor. This is pretty much exactly what many in this thread are talking about, with the significant difference being that there are few participating sites, and the ones on there are generally targeted at the kinds of demographics who care an unusual amount about avoiding ads. The reason there's barely any buy-in on the content provider side is because most sites know that their readers wouldn't like it.

This is my issue with most subscriptions too. The price has to be set based on the average use, which makes it really expensive for the infrequent user (and ultimately this means less conversions, yet nobody seems to care about this?!).

I've had the same gripe with games for years. I stopped paying for Xbox live and World of Warcraft because they're the same - if I only played for a few hours in a month, I've paid over-the-odds. I can't predict in a given month how likely I am to have how many hours, so I end up paying them £0. They could get more money out of me if they had a better PAYG or tiering option.

Obviously (in these cases) there are market segments that favor all you can eat subscriptions and those that favor à la carte. It makes sense that for most things the heavy users get the sub and the light users get to pay for what they use. However I thought of a counter example. Spotify. I would normally be a light user of music. I had some CDs in the 90s but lost interest in the whole thing by the time I graduated Uni. However it’s still nice to listen to some music sometimes. However I couldn’t imagine being able to buy all the singles I listen to in a month for less than €9.

That’s the secret. Price your subs so it’s a better offer for the lightest of users. Not hard in the music business that was ripe for disruption.

And I think that’s the message in the article. Subs themselves are not the problem , but the way they are priced . (Although the fact that he spends so much money on subs kind of negates his argument. It seems like people like him are happy to pay which reinforces the soundness of the business case).

Incidentally I subscribe to ms office even though I would never have paid a one off fee for it. I think it’s cheap enough to justify its value. I also subscribe to Netflix but should really cancel. In europe there is not much content there. When I first got it i watched maybe 4 or 5 interesting documentaries now I never see anything there worth watching. I might unsubscribe after my daughter finishes binging gravity falls. (She’s not a big user either we both find YouTube more interesting and relevant than European Netflix)

Subscriptions usually work better when the variety of content/product offered is big. Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, NY Times; these companies offer a lot of content from a lot of producers. In contrast, most media subscriptions offer you a few articles per week that is worth of reading. The rest is usually written by people who are not necessarily more knowledgeable about the topic than their readers but only have the skill/patience of writing an article about them.

I tend to prefer subscriptions for things where what I'm consuming is somewhat throwaway; so things like TV, films, books (things I'd never want to revisit/rewatch). I don't prefer it for things I might like music though. Some years ago, I ripped all my CDs (yeah, it was a lot of effort) and said I'd spend up to £10/month on music rather than a Spotify sub. I don't spend anything like that, but still tend to pick up all the new music I like. At any point I could stop buying new music and still having a big library, so I think it's worked out well.

That said, if Google Play Music Unlimited was either half the price (£5/mo) or was shareable with my wife for the current price, I'd probably have a different opinion!

This is one of the underappreciated benefits of ads: infrequent or freeloading users were subsidized by the users that converted. Every day you are being subsidized by users that don't use adblockers. Eventually this will end and you'll be left with no option but to complain about spending money, but what did anyone expect?

Free shit forever?

> Every day you are being subsidized by users that don't use adblockers

I guess I'm a subsidiser; I don't use an ad blocker (for many reasons). I'm also slightly of the opinion that people using ad-blockers have made things worse for those that don't :(

I don't mind ads - I don't even mind advertises tracking some things to give me more relevant ads (heck, I'd tell them what I like to get more relevant ads).. I do mind obtrusive and noisy ads, and the security risks that tend to come with them (and other third party content) being slapped on every site with no thought though; and for some content I would pay to a reasonable fee to remove them.

This can be relative, in some cases at least. My go-to notes app is Bear and they charge EUR14/Year. For me that's a decent price to keep the software existing in the long run.

For some things I prefer the subscription model because of the incentives it creates, every article I read or day that I go to a gym lowers the overall cost-per-visit. With a per-article or per-visit model, I would be disincentivized to read and go to the gym. It also frees me from repeatedly making the same decision every day, do I value $1 more the content of this article? Do I value $10 more than going to the gym right now?

For me the nice thing about blendle is cheap access to several sources, if they have a prepaid plan that charges monthly at $10 for 60 articles (16c/article), I would do that.

I think it depends a lot on if you experience journalism as more similar to a gym (exercise for your brain) or netflix/hulu (entertainment).

Here’s the problem with paying per article read: The vast majority of people likely don’t want to read articles so much as they want to say, “I subscribe to The NY Times.”

Netflix released data showing that people added documentaries and art house movies to their queues but never watched them. Instead they watched the same action movies and comedies over and over.

It’s the same reason as why gyms charge per month not per visit. What people say they do and what they actually do is barely connected at all.

That seems counter to what makes moviepass so successful. I pay a fixed monthly cost, and now the incremental cost of each movie is $0. Decoupling the consumption from the payment changes how I think about going to see a movie. It seems like consumers may prefer this model, at least with regards to movies in theaters (moviepass), movies and tv at home (netflix), and music (spotify).

Moviepass is cratering. Why would you say they are successful? The are net negative on a per customer basis. They lost $150M last quarter.

Their only positive income is investment rounds. Negative return on investment.

It’s like subsidizing your company with credit cards. And having a business model of “apply for new credit cards”

Fair enough. The comment I was replying to was trying to make a point that consumers don't like a la cart models, so I think the consumer side of moviepass was the pertinent feature (they're wildly successful in terms of people loving it). It may suck for moviepass's finances, but as a consumer it's great and the $0 incremental cost has changed how I think about going to the movies. You could argue that the bulk of that happiness is that I'm just happy I'm paying less, which is hard to introspect. In that regard, maybe a profitable biz like netflix is a better example.

But then I realize that artists are complaining about getting screwed by spotify, studios are jacking up prices on netflix, and even services like classpass are changing. I wonder how many (if any?) of these subscription a la cart businesses have actually reached equilibrium.

You have to question a business model which only turns a profit when customers are paying for something they don't need. Unless they can negotiate favourable deals their only path to profitability is delivering no value to a high percentage of subscribers.

Why do VC's invest in startups with large userbases but no revenue streams?

On the flip side, sometimes to a service's detriment. I think this model works well for MoviePass, Netflix, Spotify, but MasterClass recently shifted to an all-you-can-eat subscription model (before you paid per class), and even though the service is the same and the price is cheaper (for me), my interaction with the service suffered. Before, I'd carefully carve out time for a MasterClass I was interested in, knowing it was a big commitment in time and dollars. Now I can just dip in and out to anything on offer, and that's exactly what I've done. My engagement has gone way down because I'm not committed to an individual class in the same way.

I've had a subscription to PluralSight off an on for years, but I recently started paying for one off videos from Udemy. I think I like that model better.

Most people would complain at paying more than 5% for reading 5% or the articles though, and the exact pay for what you use model doesn't cover any costs that are fixed or otherwise not equally spread over each item. While this doesn't count for a fair number of individuals, people as a unit will neither want to subsidise everyone else nor want to pay the fixed costs when they use very little (why should I pay 1x for a unit when it is 2x for 4?). You can present it as a discount for bulk, but only to an extent.

> The issue many people, myself included, ...

> my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity

This is a problem for the producers too if they try a pay-per-unit model instead: their income could waiver unpredictably between more than enough and literally negative (not meeting the production costs). Either way, someone is gambling.

> Blendle's money back if its click bait policy is the clincher.

That sounds like something I'll have to investigate. Thanks for the pointer.

Blendle looks awesome, thanks!

It's worth it to me to avoid managing dozens of separate logins for every site.

”I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want”

Why do you think they don’t understand? AFAIK, Blendle’s business model (even at those prices you think are too high) hasn’t proven viable yet.

I love the idea of blendle and i keep trying to use it, but unfortunately they don't make it easy to find articles.

You can scroll through their list of recommended articles, but if you already know the article you want to read (if, for instance, i find a WSJ article on HN that i want to read) there's no easy way to pay for that article on blendle. They need a tool that lets me paste in a canonical article URL and get the corresponding article on Blendle.

The problem with individual access purchase is that (usually) I don't know if an article was worth reading until I have read it. Not every issue of The Atlantic or the New Yorker attracts my attention but enough go them do so so I have a subscription.

We do the same with app subscriptions. I may go a month or 2 not using an app. It's always made me question the subscription model. There are times I won't subscribe where as I would have purchased the app for a one time fee.

People call this "nickel and diming" they hate it.

Have you tried Blendle? It's pay per story and has all of the major paywalled news sources.

It also allows you to get a refund after reading an article if you think it was clickbait.

Articles are $0.09-0.50 in my experience.

How do they win if they end up making less money? What you are paying for is journalists doing research every month to produce those articles so you could access them on demand. If you want that on demand access you need to pay them for the work they do every month not the work they do one off.

I think the idea is instead of having 1 user pay you $30 a month, you have 10 users (or more) paying you $3 a month, you end up with a net win (even at equivalent of $30 a month of revenue because now you've had more eyeballs).

The problem is most publishers still don't necessarily believe this model or think it'll work, or think it's too risky. Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and essentially required little work from the publishers themselves to integrate (Blendle devs did most of the work to import the content, publishers just had to agree), and the Blendle solution doesn't "rock the boat" for these publishers, i.e. doesn't change existing users on their web site's behaviors.

> I think the idea is instead of having 1 user pay you $30 a month, you have 10 users (or more) paying you $3 a month, you end up with a net win

Intuitively, I believe it's much easier to find one person to pay you $30 a month for quality journalism than to find 10 people to pay $3 a month.

Neither of us have data to back our assertions but my argument is that the people that care about and read quality journalism are well off people and the marginal cost of paying $10 or $30 a month is not significant for them.

>Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and essentially required little work from the publishers themselves to integrate

I've never heard of blendle until reading the comments in this topic but just as a comparison, the WSJ has 1,270,000 digital subscribers paying $45 a month. Blendle has 550,000 users.

They win because they make more money.

One of the challenges is that if you look at this as a single consumer / single producer model it is very hard to see the economics. That is why internet advertising is also hard to see sometimes. Nearly everyone I know tells me "How do they make any money on internet ads? I never click on them." And for lots of people that is true, but for another population it is not true. And when you look at page views as a 'population' of say a million different people, and 1% of them, or 10,000 of them click on an advertisement that pays $0.10 per click, that is $1,000 of revenue from that one article. And if the marginal cost to host a single article on a web site is $1 per month, there is tremendous leverage there.

So this model insures that nearly everybody that reads and article has paid a small amount. This is more reliable income than Internet Ads even with 99% of the readers not clicking. And the article lives forever, and as we see on this web site some articles get cycled through popularity again and again every couple of years. People who have blog sites and track metrics see this effect when someone puts them on Reddit (for example).

A static article page can service a lot of page views with very little hardware. Nginx on a current server can serve the same article up at 50,000 page views per second if there is enough network bandwidth and the article is on an SSD. Hosting costs go up when you add a bunch of dynamic content but much of that can be hosted on CDNs and distributed to the edge. Done with any mount of care and planning and it costs little to host material on the web.

>They win because they make more money.

You have no data to back any of your hand wavy assertions. You are not smarter than the people that decide the business model for these publications. People are not willing to pay 10 or 20 cents to read articles that they clicked on a whim. We already know this from the app economy.

Actually I have quite a bit of experience around this. I've been working on understanding the economics of information since the mid 90's when I helped start an online web magazine about golf of all things. With the help of some grad students at Berkeley's Haas School of business we came up with the core mechanisms about how information can gain value and how it can lose that value. Also a number of ways to capture that value without destroying it in the process. The marketing person from that web property went on to Apple where they instituted the 99 cents per song music model that came to dominate music sales. The arguments against are familiar, "We sell an album not a song because those songs that aren't hits won't support their production costs.", "All songs will be tailored to sales and music quality will suffer.", "Labels (and by trickle down Artists) will make less because even buying 3 songs is less than they would get buying one $15 album." Instead the music industry flourished in the new system and more people got to experience more music more easily than ever before.

It isn't a question of smart or not smart, it is understanding that the economics of goods models we developed during the industrial revolution are not directly translatable to the economics of information.

I've been a fan of Blendle from the start because based on my research to date, I knew that if they could be operationally efficient enough, they would be able to facilitate per article transactions in an iTunes like model. And if they could do that it would have a larger impact than iTunes did on music. They continue to hum along and I continue to use them for that.

The "App" market is interesting because as I characterized information, Apps don't qualify, rather they contain algorithms. Because of that, their value is created through novelty rather than being intrinsic.

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