Blendle has received $3.8M from The New York Times and Axel Springer | Hacker News Reader

Blendle has received $3.8M from The New York Times and Axel Springer

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43 pointsbold8 comments

Good for Blendle! Not the first Dutch start-up to be funded by US investors, but one of the most well known (in the Netherlands anyway).

As far as I am aware, there is no US-based Blendle yet? (An article aggregator where you pay per article). If so, they have a large market ahead of them!

On behalf of the team: Thanks! (I only recently joined, so I can't take any credit myself).

As far as we know, there's no other company in the world that offers this 'pay-per-article-service'.

Blendle has been tremendously succesful in the Netherlands, proving to us that people are still interested in high quality journalism. It's just that until Blendle came along, the way journalism is offered to readers was outdated to the point of it being ridiculous. We're happy to provide an easy alternative!

Grats to Blendle, but I don't really get the big deal. Isn't this just micro payments on bite sized content? Doesn't this just devolve into a reinforced bubble contest of which articles can get the most people to read them and thus editors (and data science people) know which articles/journalists to invest in? How do you publish unpopular stories in a world where only the popular get paid for?

Thanks for the grats!

Well, when you get right down to it, all internet startups essentially focused on 'reading words that were typed into such a box by someone else previously.' [0] :)

The reinforced bubble you speak of is not what we're seeing in the articles being bought, but it is something that has our attention. We love great investigative reporting and journalism. Keeping that alive and nurturing that is our raison d'être.

So if that happens and if we can, we're going to prevent that bubble.

[0] https://plus.google.com/117114202722218150209/posts/KhMRNmgG...

Great news for blendle, but their irritating widget has already turned me off a few sites that use it and I was a pretty regular visitor there.

Anything we can do to improve your experience?

Make your content stand out as different rather than trying really hard to embed it in such a way that it becomes a seamless part of the surroundings. I can see how that improves your bottom line but it seems like an anti-pattern to me.

Thanks for your feedback!

I'll put it in the feature-request-backlog, but things are kindof exploding right now, so it'll be a while before it will get any attention.

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