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Comment by _frog | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the thought that Instapaper is somehow robbing writers of ad revenue, I think it needs to be noted that you actually have to visit an article to add it to your Instapaper queue. On top of that, Readability's model of paying authors isn't all that effective, a recent article on The Brooks Review[1] showed that even a moderately popular site such as his generates nearly no income from Readability's service, especially now that the service has gone free with optional payments.

Also, what happens to all those authors that don't opt in to receive payments from Readability? Does readability just take money on their behalf and not actually pay it out to them? It seems like that would be a legal grey area.

[1]: http://brooksreview.net/2012/03/readability-ios/

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it needs to be noted that you actually have to visit an article to add it to your Instapaper queue

That isn't true. Lots of sites/aggregators add "Read it later" buttons to articles so it will go right into your queue and then there is the "Browse" page on Instapaper itself where you can add articles as well.

Fair point, some Twitter clients let you send a tweeted link straight to Instapaper too, but in my experience the overwhelming majority of links I add come from me using the bookmarklet when I visit a web page.

I know that lots of services let you add to Instapaper, but with Instapaper itself it's impossible to add articles without visiting them. I think I recall Marco talking about the fact that this is on purpose for the previously stated concerns. Also, Instapaper doesn't let you stitch articles broken up into multiple pages.

Actually multi-page stitching just got added to the browser bookmarklet, relevant blog post: http://blog.instapaper.com/post/18556429689

Marco previously felt uncomfortable implementing this feature (http://www.marco.org/2011/07/19/siracusa-multipage), so I wonder what prompted the change in policy.

"I know that lots of services let you add to Instapaper, but with Instapaper itself it's impossible to add articles without visiting them."

I can understand his dilemma, but this policy unfortunately makes the social feature of Instapaper almost unusable. You want to Read Later a bunch of articles your friends have liked? You have to load each one of them up just so you can add it later.

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