In an attempt to counteract declining ad revenues on the web due to widespread use of ad blockers (myself included), Dutch news aggregator Blendle is entering the U.S. market with a service that let users pay for content from different media companies. And it looks like users are drawn to more comprehensive material.
For more than a decade, newspapers and magazines have been struggling to make up for plummeting revenues from print advertising. Web ads aren't nearly as lucrative, and most readers aren't inclined to shell out for access to content behind a digital paywall. Increasingly, readers are getting their news on Facebook and Twitter, or surfing the web with ad blockers that eliminate all marketing. From August 2014 to 2015, ad blocking cost publishers nearly $22 billion, according to a survey by Adobe and PageFair, a company that measures use of ad blocking by visitors to publisher websites. In the US, ad blocking rose by over 48% in the same time period.
Blendle, a Dutch news aggregator, thinks it has the solution for publishers. Founded almost two years ago, the platform enables readers to use a single account to purchase individual stories from different media companies, without a subscription, an a la carte approach to consuming content on the web. The platform has over 650,000 users in Germany and The Netherlands, more than half of whom are under 35. Today it's launching to 10,000 customers in the US with big name media partners like The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
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On average about 10 percent of users asked for a refund as of a April 2015. But gossip magazines, listicles, and other clickbait material see very high refund percentages, up to 50 percent. "It's the original reporting, great background stories, deep analysis, big profiles and interviews that make the top of the list," Klöpping [Alexander Klöpping, co-founder of Blendle] wrote in an e-mail. Of course, it's not clear if asking people to pay per article will help cultivate more informed citizens. A study by two University of Tennessee professors showed that micropayments in journalism actually hinder discovery, as people are unlikely to pay to read articles that they believe will contradict their opinions.
