The idea of convincing readers to pay a few pennies to read a single article has been largely scoffed at over the years, but Blendle may have cracked the code, at least a little bit.
Launched two years ago in Europe, Blendle says it just surpassed the one-million-member mark. It’s getting hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors and 20% are converting into paying customers. Users will have read more than 20 million articles on Blendle by the end of the year, Managing Editor Michaël Jarjour told TechCrunch. It’s backed by The New York Times Co. and German publisher Axel Springer, and features content from an assortment of big-name publishers.
Users pay a few pennies to read an article and have the option of requesting a refund if they don’t like what they see. Refund requests must include a reason, a hitch Blendle adds to prevent abuse. Jarjour said the company employees 15 journalists who comb the Web looking for worthwhile stories that are hidden behind paywalls.
Blendle has elements of Flipboard, Nuzzel and other social news services in the form of human-curated feeds. If users provide access to their social network accounts, Blendle will add durations from friends into the news feed. A new service called Blendle Premium Feed is powered by a combination of algorithmic predictions and recommendations from friends.
So what will people pay to read? Not news, apparently. “We’ve seen that our users don’t like to spend money on the news,” wrote co-founder Alexander Klöpping in a Medium post announcing the company’s entry into the U.S. market. “What our users do like to read is investigative reporting, revelatory background articles, newsworthy analysis and hard-hitting interviews.”
 

John Oliver’s sendup of the news industry for preposterous ideas like Tronc is both hilarious and sad. Oliver digs into the video history bag to remind us that Sam Zell really did own a newspaper company at one point and thought that stories about cats could possibly support stories about crime and corruption. He also calls out Sheldon Adelson for instructing journalists at the Las Vegas Review Journal not to post negative stories about him or any of his properties. And the mashup of “Spotlight” with the investigative crew assigned to dig up everything it can about racoon kittens is flat-out genius. The quotes from Washington Post Editor Marty Barron about the workload news reporters have to process these days is poignant.
They aren’t laughing at the Newspaper Association of America, though, which called Oliver’s piece “petty insults” and noted that the humorist offered no solutions. Fair enough, but is it the job of a comedian to offer solutions? Pointing out absurdities like the click-bait headline atop this post is the first step toward solving problems, and thank goodness we have people like Oliver and Jon Stewart to point out what a circus media has become. It’s sad that comedians have to play the role of fact-checkers in this industry, but at least someone is willing to call out the emperor for having no clothes.