Blendle
At the end of last year, I joined Blendle as a data analyst. Blendle is a news website that aggregates articles from its partners (newspapers and magazines) and offers them to its users through a monthly fee - 9.99€ for regular subscriptions. Users get a daily selection of hard news and unlimited access to a series of magazines. The majority of that monthly fee goes to the publishers, and a small fee goes to Blendle to cover operational costs.
Why is it relevant?
While we all consume news, most of us have grown increasingly frustrated with the fragmented landscape in which we find ourselves to access high-quality articles. The biggest newspapers and magazines need to use paywalls to make sure that they can remunerate their staff and readers tend to consume free articles and bounce to sites that are not hidden behind payments.
Clearly no model seems to have established itself as superior to others. You wil find some of the most important publications trying out different models. The Guardian decided to offer its content freely to keep information equally accessible to those who cannot afford its fees, asking its readers to donate whenever possible, following Wikipedia in a donation-driven model. The New York Times offered some free articles for free each month before hitting a paywall asking to subscribe and recently moved to a mandatory account to read some articles freely, while others will require a subscription. A hybrid model that tries to collect user information including email addresses, which will help them contact them to sell their subscription. Le Monde chose to have a separation of its content between paid and free articles, the latter becoming increasingly scarce over the years.
In short, there seems to be no holy grail, and those models are constantly being reinvented to maximize revenue.
Sustainable revenue models
Achieving a sustainable revenue model remains a core challenge for all news media. While they can impose their news standards, through agenda setting and editorship, they struggle with easing distribution. It used to be relatively straightforward to send daily copies of their papers through print factories around the world, who would then handle dissemination proportionally. Digitalization means that you print less, but it also means that readers are more versatile. They get more access to a variety of content for free and you find yourself battling a wave of competitors who simply did not exist previously. How can the New York Times convince a reader to read about Saudi Arabia’s Kashoogi assassination on their website while the Guardian offers a comparable article for free? Committing readers to a single publisher like they used to do it with print has become obsolete.
In an ideal world, readers would pay for the articles they are interested across the whole range of news available to them. You could choose to read about Saudi Arabia from Le Monde, while you prefer to get US elections coverage from the NYT. Currently, you would need two parallel subscriptions. This quickly gets out of hand for users who do not want to spend more than is reasonable.
Digitalization is good from a reader perspective because it enlarges the access to a diversity of news. But it is equally threatening because struggling small publishers are facing incommensurable financial challenges. The larger ones are competing and readers are not keen on having multiple subscriptions. This is where Blendle comes with a solution. A centralized platform where all partner publishers can be read equally, and where the benefit from the subscriptions is proportionally redistributed to the publishers based on readers read history.
Why would magazines and newspapers want to collaborate with Blendle?
Why would the New York Times want to collaborate with Blendle? Isn’t it, after all, another competitor trying to establish itself as the most trustworthy party and that will benefit from selling the content of others?
While it is true that Blendle takes a fixed fee on the subscriptions, it also offers something unique: a level playing field for Blendle subscribers. By being able to browse newspapers freely and choosing the articles they care about, readers are not coerced in a single publisher offering. The distribution model is different and offer a more diverse exposure to news.
On top of it, Blendle is currently established in the Netherlands, Germany and the United States. American newspapers can benefit from selling their content to European audiences and vice versa. Those audiences are not the main subscribers of their content.
How are the articles selected?
Central to the offering of Blendle is its curated news feed. Having access to so many diverse publications, a reader can easily feel lost and everyone doesn’t have time to browse all publications every day. Therefore, an editorial team selects some of the most important articles of the moment, multiple times a day. This way, the Blendle homepage can look like a regular news landing page, with the most relevant articles on top. The strength of Blendle also comes from its ability to personalize the content feed based on its users preferences. Each user can choose the topics of interest that they find most relevant to them.
Data science models can then decipher which topics and which articles will be most relevant in a complementary personal selection in addition to the main editorial section, and suggest those to them. The idea is to combine the best articles about a given topic across different publications so that readers can get the most relevant info about a topic they care about.
Dutch Blendle Readers therefore get access to:
- An editorially curated overview of the news, multiple times a day
- A personal selection crafted on their topical and publication interests, every day
- An unlimited browsing and reading from selected magazines
- An unlimited browsing of daily newspapers, and an option to read additional articles for a small fee per additional article
- Curated selections about topics (e.g. Health, Politics, Homeworking etc.), updated every few weeks
- Curated selections from experts and/or celebrities (e.g. article selection from a feminist group, or a popular sports figure)
- The ability to search through Blendle’s large content offering and access articles within or outside their bundle
- Audio articles every day, voiced over from the editorial team.
- A daily, weekly and magazine newsletter selecting the best content of the day / month / etc.
Currently, German and American users can read the articles they want based on a micro transaction system for each read.
Working at Blendle
It might already be evident to you from having read this long overview of the company I work for but I love working for Blendle. Working for Blendle means trying to make high-quality journalism available in the most convenient way possible to readers. Our current offering is far from perfect, but it is already coming a long way to try and offer a convenient space for everyone to access news. I do believe that our product is helping pave the way to the future model of journalism. A model that will benefit readers, and adequately remunerate its content producers.