Micro payments are the future in this age of adblockers (listen to @cdixon and @benedictevans talk about it: https://a16z.com/2015/09/25/a16z...). Blendle is one of the most promising startups from The Netherlands (in my humble opinion ;) ), and I'm really excited to see where they can take this! Launching in the US with the help of NYTimes (one of their investors). @AlexanderNL can tell you more!
@alexandernl@bramk I've been following blendle's progress for a while via your active Medium blog. I run an active daily newsletter. Is there a way for me to publish that newsletter to Blendle as well?
Yesterday we announced that we will start a USA beta early 2016. It's fist come, first served!
We're live in the Netherlands for over 1,5 years and already have 500.000 users, which is a lot for our small country. A few months ago we launched in Germany with all (100+) publishers and now we're coming to America. Super exciting times.
Read more about our beta and Blendle itself on Medium - https://medium.com/zu-blendle/eu...
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Congrats @alexandernl@emieljanson on this product, on initial glance it looks great! I work for a curated news startup called Wildcard, and I'm really curious to hear how Blendle was able to develop it's business model. How are you able to sell customers content that your company doesn't own? Does your team have contracts with the NYTimes and WSJ to sell their paywalled content?
Congrats again, look forward to testing out the beta!
I really don't like this product at all. This is the most literal expressions of a newspaper, but digital. Instead of taking newspapers into the 21st century Blendle keeps them the way they were. Besides the monetisation model this is the most perfect example of looking to your past for your design. As Ford would say: A faster horse. Seems like it was made for publishers to make money while not changing their attitudes.
However I do see why readers of newspapers will love this product. It's approachable I think.
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very cool - of course, with curated news, it would be helpful to have a political profile for all curators as well as a profile of all stock holdings, current and recent employers and other vital data that produces bias
@passingnotes That's a good point, David. Considering how polarized so much news reporting has become that would be a differentiating value.
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@lynnfredricks I agree - would help separate the Fox News types from the msnbc types, cnn types and bbc and guardian types, etc
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Congrats @AlexanderNL and @emieljanson . It's hard to find good journalism nowadays, I see many news sites downgrading with badly written articles :( However I haven't tried this out in NL yet because I browse through different websites to read nice articles. So now I am curious, what is the best premium journalism according to you? Can I expect the most interesting articles from great journalists or do you mean excluding ads and filtering articles for me?
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