I started subscribing and paying for Blendle about a month ago. Their service shows me article summaries from otherwise expensive publications like The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Economist, etc. I can view a full article from $0.10 to about $0.50 without advertisements.
I spend a little over a dollar a week and I get to occasionally read articles from sources that are expensive to buy a full subscription for.
I wonder if publishers find Blendle's usage statistics to be useful. They certainly track users'navigation across their own web properties, but knowing which articles people are willing to pay for must be a good signal.
I've just started trialing Blendle, it looks very promising although the prices feel slightly higher than I'd be happy with and I'm not sure how I feel about the browsing/article discovery interface.
But in principle I'm a huge fan of micropayments for journalism, so I'm going to keep using it for a while and see how it goes!
I tend to only read a few articles a week on Blendle so itt is not expensive, butt yes, for a 'news junkie' who reads news everyday it could get expensive.
>I can view a full article from $0.10 to about $0.50 without advertisements.
Thats at least an order of magnitude more expensive than its worth (to me), and 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more than they would make from ads. As an ad-blocking user who reads a lot of online content, I am in favor in the pay for content model, but it has to come at an appropriate price. A couple cents per reading minute is the high end of what most news/magazine/blog type writing is worth to me.
Pre-internet you could buy the Sunday edition of your city's newspaper for 50 cents. This included dozens of in-depth articles. So yea, probably on the order of a penny per article. Though it was heavily subsidized by car dealer advertisements and the classifieds.
It was pretty much completely paid by advertising; the purpose of charging readers is because paid circulation numbers is an important metric used by advertisers.
Yeah, thats pretty much it -- I remember print media too! Quality digital journalism from somewhere like NYT or WP (your opinions may vary) is worth $10/year/sub to me as an occasional reader. Unfortunately, they cost 10x that.
I spend a little over a dollar a week and I get to occasionally read articles from sources that are expensive to buy a full subscription for.
I wonder if publishers find Blendle's usage statistics to be useful. They certainly track users'navigation across their own web properties, but knowing which articles people are willing to pay for must be a good signal.