Have you heard of https://blendle.com/ ? They brand themselves as 'Spotify for journalism', with a pay-per-article approach, with an instant refund if you don't like the article. I only started using them a couple of days ago, so I don't have any further useful comment, but it seems like a promising approach.
Blendle is a solution to a very different problem. Blendle provides unbundling for popular magazines and newspapers, i.e. you can selectively read single articles for < 1€ rather than having to buy a full issue of the paper in question.
It's really well done, but basically does what the iTunes store did for MP3s.
What Medium faces is a rather different beast: Trying to reach the holy grail of finding non-advertising funding for journalism (ideally, without a subscription-based model).
I think Blendle's funding model has potential. Of particular importance is how smooth it is to read, and just as easy to say 'nope, not for this one', or not.
I've read good things on Medium, but if anything Sturgeon's Law is too generous regarding overall quality. Considering the nature of the beast, I'm not even sure it is possible to change the quality ratio without potentially breaking what Medium is.
I'd be happy chipping in sub-dollar amounts here and there for the good stuff, but I am not going to pay a flat fee for access to what amounts to a whole lot of tripe and just a few meatballs.
That's what I like about Blendle's model. I'm an infrequent user (< 1 article a month) but I probably spent more on Blendle than the cost of a subscription to any one of Blendle's sources.
Out of all the articles I read, I think I clicked the refund button maybe twice, and that was only because the article was truly terrible.
I can say with certainty that I wouldn't have bothered reading any of these paywalled articles if Blendle didn't exist.
I think it is an analogy (pick whatever you want from whichever supplier you want, without having to sub to them individually) more than an exact duplication.
Well, the point of the analogy was to illustrate the business model.
I think there's room for a spotify model in writing. As a consumer, instead of a centralised platform, I'd like it to be an integration on the various websites I get content from.
I.e. the normal internet with it's various publishing engines, but paywall automatically bypased, ads automatically disabled and producer automatically credited & paid because I'm signed in to my 'servicename' account.
I just don't think there are enough people in America right now with any extra money to spend on articles. The middle class has to worry about paying for food and necessities. Millennials can't afford cable, and people think they will pay for internet articles they are used to getting for free? That business model is doomed from day one.
I'm surrounded by millennials, and most of the pay for Spotify and Netflix, or share an account with family members.
Furthermore, while I'm not 'poor', I'm quite frugal, and yet I've spent quite a bit of money already on Blendle articles.
The biggest hurdle in my case was signing up and connecting my account to a payment system. But once that barrier was crossed, paying somewhere between 10 cents and 1 euro on a article became a (concerning) easy thing to do. I suspect I'm not alone in this.
People made similar arguments about selling MP3's when piracy was free. As soon as Apple was able to remove enough friction from the buying process, the market exploded.
Even people with the most modest of incomes used to regularly pay a quarter to read the daily newspaper. I see no reason why they wouldn't again, if the process was smooth enough.
I'm not sure that's true, I just think the price has to be right. For example, I would gladly pay a penny (UK money) per month to access an ad-free Medium, even though I never consciously visit that site, just because it's such a small amount of money that it's not worth bothering over. Same would go, for example, for Hacker News.
Obviously, a penny is a ridiculous under-exaggeration, but I feel it demonstrates the point well; 60,000,000 times a penny isn't bad money. And clearly a real-world business model would charge at least an order of magnitude more than that.
The real problem here is transferring that money in a cost-effective way. Would it be impossible for a central gateway to manage that task, charging providers a small fee for the service?
