Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

Much like birger, I never paid for any of the &#x27;paywalled&#x27; news outlets before. Mostly due to the terrible user experience, t&amp;c, and lack of content (often single newspaper&#x2F;magazine). Even though I find most content in newspapers not even worth reading, let alone paying for. I do really want to pay for some high quality articles and Blendle makes this possible.<p>They nailed it for me with the money back option, truly no questions asked. The pre-paid wallet makes me comfortable in that I don&#x27;t feel tricked&#x2F;lured into some subscription or other form of overpaying. Overall very smooth UX, no annoying crap. Makes you wonder why so many websites still try to nag me into paying when it only drives me away from them.<p>Would like to see some (a lot) more titles, especially international, but understand they are working on this. Also, since alexandernl is reading.. please add wordcount to the webinterface and wordcount&#x2F;price to emails, thanks :)<p>Other than that, much enjoyed. Keep up the good work!

Good to see this data point:<p><i>&quot;We don’t sell a lot of news in Blendle. People apparently don’t want to spend money on something they can get everywhere for free now. People do spend money on background pieces. Great analysis. Opinion pieces. Long interviews. Stuff like that. In other words: people don’t want to spend money on the ‘what’, they want to spend money on the ‘why’..<p>Our users punish clickbait by refunding<p>..Gossip magazines, for example, get much higher refund percentages than average (some up to 50% of purchases), as some of them are basically clickbait in print. People will only pay for content they find worth their money ... As a publisher, you have to invest in incredible journalism to be able to sell them on a per-article basis. Luckily, a lot of incredible journalism is being produced every day.&quot;</i>

I&#x27;m not Dutch-speaking and tried registering -- successfully! There seem to be some purely English language articles&#x2F;newspapers already there: I&#x27;ve found at least <i>The Economist</i> and <i>WSJ&#x2F;Wall Street Journal</i>. Every new account seems to get free 2.50 EUR credit on start; later you can apparently pay with PayPal or credit card. (Note however, that I haven&#x27;t actually tested reading any article or paying yet.) To create an account you have to &quot;read&quot; some Dutch -- but some common sense + Google Translate was enough for me to get through.<p><i>[Update]</i> Tried reading something (from WSJ, fully in English indeed), then tested and confirmed that the &quot;refund&quot; works. Just FYI (&quot;random trivia&quot;), when clicking &quot;refund&quot;, there&#x27;s additional dialog asking for the reason. Translated by Google Translate roughly as:<p><i>Why do you want your 29 cents back?</i> <i>We want to know why you want your money back, so we can tell the author and publisher.</i><p><i>[ ] I accidentally clicked on the article</i><p><i>[ ] I find the price too high</i><p><i>[ ] The article was too short</i><p><i>[ ] The article was too long</i><p><i>[ ] The article was not what I expected</i><p><i>[ ] The article was not legible</i><p><i>[ ] Other...</i>

Just want to add something to the conversation about The Netherlands. A cool thing about this startup is that one of its founders (alexandernl here on HN) is a celebrity in The Netherlands. I would guess if you&#x27;d go to a random Dutch street and show people his picture, 7&#x2F;10 adults would recognize him. Alexander is a frequent guest who explains tech products at one of the NL&#x27;s most hot prime time shows, he&#x27;s basically the person who explains what an iPhone app is to everyone over 30 in the Netherlands (assuming everyone under 30 already knew).<p>Now The Netherlands isn&#x27;t such a big place, just 17 million people or so, so in the grand scheme of things this is not so big of a deal. But it&#x27;s important to note that were Blendle founded in a bigger country this might not have gone as well at all. How would you both get a foothold in the press industry <i>and</i> get major coverage on national TV? Alexander is in exactly the right place and at exactly the right time.<p>Now they&#x27;ve effectively proven their worth on a reasonably large scale, they&#x27;ve used that cred to break into the NYT and the WSJ. How&#x27;s that for an awesome business plan? I think it&#x27;s the best advantage small European countries have. We&#x27;ve got &lt;20m inhabitant language isolated nations all over the place. Even the celebrities with prime time are accessible. If you&#x27;re in the startup scene in NL, odds are you are friendly with someone who is friendly with Alexander.<p>edit: of course, he has an awesome co-founder and technical team as well, you can&#x27;t be successful without the tech being top notch.

The model seems to work and they seem to have great traction. I can see all the objections but the proof is in the pudding. Really liked this sentence from their answer to a critic:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;You said you talked about the idea of Blendle when I was two years old. But Blendle is not an “idea”. Blendle is about execution. And because of that we’ve gathered more than 140.000 users in The Netherlands with a $0 marketing budget.&quot;&quot;&quot;<p>Seems somewhat reasonable to assume this could be transfered to the hyperbroken academic publishing model (publisher resistence is a lot higher and older articles are worth more than for typical newspaper stuff though). One source, micropayment per article, refund policy. One can dream ;)

I&#x27;m one of the &#x27;didn&#x27;t pay for newspapers before&#x27; and right now spend a couple of euro&#x27;s a month on Blendle.<p>Articles cost between € 0,10, and € 0,50. If you buy so much articles from one paper &#x2F; magazine that it is cheaper to get the whole edition, you get the whole edition. Refund work perfect. You don&#x27;t like the article -&gt; click -&gt; money back. No questions asked.

Have you guys considered a Spotify style subscription model? Say, where I as a reader would pay a fixed monthly fee but would then be able to read as many articles as I wanted from the various sources you guys support throughout the month? Of course, the fees would be split across the publishers proportional to the time or number of articles I read from each.<p>If you have, what were some of the pros and cons you saw in something like that?

Great idea - I&#x27;m happy to pay $50-$100 a year on good journalism, I just don&#x27;t know where I want to spend that money and on what type of articles. The one click pay and refund policy sounds good.<p>Can&#x27;t wait until you get more North American publications :)

This is something I&#x27;ve wanted for years. I wish I knew the price though. There is a tendency to overshoot on the price initially and the result is turning off most of the potential market.

I feel like the &#x27;no questions asked&#x27; (or &#x27;one question asked&#x27; as akavel points out) refund is really the killer feature here. It aligns incentives for journalists and outlets correctly, provides a feedback loop, and it also lowers the hesitation to pay, all at the same time.

This is very very beautiful. As a owner of an Auto Industry Magazine in Pakistan. I would love this, since my magazine subscriptions are going down.<p>And my site isn&#x27;t generating money.

This might be one of the cases where being in a small country is useful. You can get significant coverage to validate a model quickly before exporting it internationally.

Quality of content in this way can be measured in these micropayments + refunds instead of points&#x2F;votes. Down with clickbait articles and up with good content.<p>By the way, I also fit the target audience: not buying newspapers, but I have added money to my Blendle account and spend it every now and then.<p>I am wondering about the economics though: the traction seems good, but is it enough to really add value for the publishers? I&#x27;d love to see more numbers on this.

Really cool! As a dutch student (econometrie) I do not &#x2F; didn&#x27;t know that anyone used this. Kind of silly since it was right under my nose.<p>Very awesome :) if you guys need a werkstudent as a financial analyst or just a quantitative guy who likes to play with code and excel sheets ;)

You mentioned you have plans for expanding internationally. Any comments on that? :-)<p>(I like the idea and I wouldn&#x27;t mind to pay for things I read that interests me, unbundled. So you&#x27;d be welcome to sign up some Swedish papers!)

Would like to see this process taken across the web. As someone who doesn&#x27;t read news articles too often I don&#x27;t mind paying but can&#x27;t justify a subscription.

What? Newspapers actually doing innovative things instead of suing Google or pressing politicians into passing ridiculous bills to preserve their old business model?

Many dutch newspapers (nrc,ad,trouw,etc) offer student discounts on their subscriptions. Do you guys have any plans for something similar?

Why do startups keep thinking micropayments is a thing people want?