Blendle ditches pay-per-article service

I think a 10 euro subscription service is a lazy business model, only one worse is everything based on ad revenue. I loved the fact that you could buy articles instead of getting another subscription.

I tried to buy an article last year, I'm not 100% sure why, but I never succeed in reading the article that I wanted to read. I just wanted to pay like 10 euro's until i needed to pay the next 10. But they were already forcing you into a monthly subscription model.

Now they are just the dutch version of apple news, seems like a terrible spot to be in.

I didn't try the audio stuff yet, that might be interesting. I enjoyed the audio stuff from Audm, but I thought it was expensive to get a subscription. Also to much competition in the podcast space.

I think https://thecorrespondent.com/ is doing a better job at changing the world. It's clearer what you get for your money, and you actually feel like your supporting journalism. Not sure if I feel the same way about Blendle.

That said, i know some people who use it, but mostly because their jobs requires them to be up to date with most newspapers.

I'm curious what exactly didn't work out. Maybe it was just the friction of signing up to read a single article? In that case, maybe what would've helped is sending the article anonymously via MMS and use carrier billing? Like 1990s ring tone downloads, though I'm not sure this model would even work today because Google's Stagefreight bug (or was it on purpose to close another channel not benefitting Google?) made telcos block MMSs. But then again, Blendle switching to a subscription model would indicate otherwise.

It was worth a try but I hated the model. I want to pay a Netflix/Spotify ballpark figure per month and be able read all newspapers. Until then I am very happy to pay the €5 a month I currently pay for one good paper (way less than the rate they show on their site btw)

I've been following them for as long as they've existed. Their business model with per article payments never made sense to me. And those 100K articles that they sold is a clear indication that this is not working. That's not users but articles sold for something like 25 cents. 25K in revenue in other words. That's nothing and they ve been citing the same number for years.

60K subscriptions is not nothing but of course not a lot of revenue either; though 600K/month does sound it should be able to sustain a small company and if you can grow that it can actually turn into substantial revenue. Of course, like with Spotify, a lot would flow directly to the publishers.

Blendle has always danced around the one thing they can't deliver which is a subscription service that offers access to all/most relevant news articles currently locked behind paywalls of the few surviving news papers that struggle to make money this way (most of them are failing or just getting by).

The likes of the New York times seem to be doing ok-ish because they are big enough to still be able to produce quality news and have a large number of subscribers. Most of the rest has given up on the notion entirely by either focusing on dwindling paper sales, or ad driven news on web sites, or like the Guardian calling for donations. It's a race to the bottom.

So, I hope they succeed but I'm pessimistic about their chances. This doesn't sound like a winning formula.

Blendle didn't succeed in getting the major national newspapers on board, because providing access to all content would make them a publisher competing directly with each newspaper's own subscriptions.

If you consider the price of a full subscription to a quality newspaper, you can see why Blendle would be way too cheap to sustain as a publishing partner; especially with a monthly flat fee.

As a reader, I would love to pay what I am paying now for one newspaper to gain access to more newspapers — particularly worldwide (Volkskrant, NRC, German FAZ, some Belgian ones, some American ones, some British (although The Guardian is already accessible — I donate a small sum yearly for their efforts)).

I wouldn't necessarily read more, but a more varied selection of articles. A flat fee is a requirement though.

What I'd like is unlimited access to my main newspaper, plus a fairly high but limited number of articles in all other newspapers and magazines (say 100 articles per month, spread over all other publications), maybe with the possibility to carry over unused credits for a few months. A digital subscription to my current newspaper is almost 30 EUR a month. I think this should be doable for the same price, assuming that people who read other papers will occasionally read something from my paper, and money is distributed according to popularity (apart from a base payment to one's main paper). It should be possible to get newspapers to cooperate to do this, possibly through something like Blendle.

A successful Blendle gives the reader independence and absolves the user of getting intimate with all the digital sales strategies at publishers. Pocket does not position itself as distributor, so I welcome Blendle as broker. They offer fulltext export to Pocket. The web based reading experience of Blendle is also solid. Though I like pay-per-article, publishers and Blendle themselves seem to disagree on its profitability.

As I’ve found out; people say they want to pay per article for content, but they much prefer free in reality.

I was surprised, when I tried Blendle, that there wasn’t an easy way to jump from a free article on a newspaper’s website to the paid version on Blendle.

Instead, if I followed a free or paywalled link on HN, I had to copy the title and search on blendle’s website. Not the most frictionless way to make authors get paid.

From now on you'll have to pay 10eur a month to access a small selection of old papers (i.e. not today's) and some magazines. Too much for too little, I feel.

People don't like microtransactions. Deciding if each article is worth a quarter is a bad user experience.

Too bad, I liked the service. I have some credit for reading articles and I wonder how they will handle that.

This discussion already started about a week ago in The Netherlands

For dutch speakers https://tweakers.net/nieuws/153570/blendle-stopt-met-verkoop...

Honestly I believe people, in general, just don't care about what the read online.

The reality is that either you believe at everything you read online or you understand that the world is so complex that it is too difficult to explain it in few capitols.

The reasonable middle ground of in deep reportages is disappearing because too complex anyway to be discussed with the "general public".

I wonder if it is possible to make people want to subscribe to in-deep articles with advertis, something in the line of: "The informed executive reads Blendle" (or something along the line) so that people who don't read Blendle are automatically considered morons or uniformed.

Is more a marketing stunt but it may be interested.

I tried signing up for Blendle, but they rejected my email address for failing validation. I contacted their customer service, but their response was incredibly poor.

Will this apply to the English service too? That has never had a subscription option to my knowledge