You don't like the article -> click -> money back. No questions asked.
That right there might be the most revolutionary part of their approach to online micro payments. You could apply it to so much.
That right there might be the most revolutionary part of their approach to online micro payments. You could apply it to so much.
It turns out, if you give people the opportunity to read in an elegant and easy way, and provide articles written by great journalists, the refund ratio stays very low (avarage of 5%).
Of course, the flip side of that (as the article mentions) is that click-baity articles tend to get a high refund ratio (sometimes up to 50%). But such a "negative" result might actually be a net-positive for journalism in general.
If Blendle continues to be successful this could get very interesting though. As described in the article linked here, it's a great metric. And their publishers will also start to use their metric. So -while they now describe the Blendle-revenue as an extra- this will actually change the way we deal with the 'print' data which is now accessible online, creating a new dynamic. This will surely have an impact on the print version of these magazines as well, I can imagine, making Blendle a content driver(shaper?) and not 'just' a source of 'extra revenue' as they tend to see it now.
If it all takes off impact will, imho, be different than we can probably predict now, even though we can make some estimates of possible directions. Some people will be happier with the results after -say- five years than others. Time will tell.
In the beginning, we obviously had to actively seek out publishers. Marten and Alexander (our founders) spend a lot of time convincing publishers to come onboard.
As you can imagine, the deal we signed with The New York Times and Axel Springer gave us more "street creds" and made it easier to communicate with new publishers.
Still though, it's a large world out there, with a lot of publishers, each with their own wishes and doubts, so Alexander and Marten still have to convince them, just on a much larger scale now.