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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

We need a Netflix for content. You pay a (reasonable) monthly subscription and they pay each content provider depending on number of views.

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https://blendle.com/ is attempting just this. They have a beta service available now, and its rather nice. You pay a few cents per article and you can easily get refunds if you don't like the article or if it isn't what you expected.

I think the pay-per-article model is still worse than a single flat fee. Because there's a marginal cost per article, each time you have an article link you have to ask yourself "do i definitely want to read this?" Even if there are refunds and stuff, this has a psychological cost. It makes sharing content harder too. It also might be weird to say even more directly that "this article produced exactly X dollars of profit," or "this journalist's articles produce X dollars of profit on average."

Also, one of the best things about the Internet & the ad model is that it made content available to everyone. Someone from a relatively poor background, or someone who's just strapped for cash at a certain time, will still have equal access to information.

I'm in the US beta, and it really is a great service. Could use more publications and the price point seems a little too high (lots more $0.49 articles than $0.19, in my experience). That said, it has proved to be popular in NL/GE and I trust that they will attract more US pubs & prices will lower as (or if) adoption grows.

Interesting, although paying and deciding which article to pay for seems tedious. I think a subscription model with an "eat as much as you can" model would be much more attractive.

Thanks, looks interesting

It would be incredibly bold for a major subscription content vendor, such as the NYTimes, to set up such a program. You sign into your NYTimes account, and sites around the web either become available to you, hide their advertising for you, or offer extra premium content just for NYTimes subscribers.

Basically, the app store model built upon the NYTimes, where you get the basic news from the New York Times and the niche stuff from content partners who the NYTimes will reimburse for page views, out of the subscription fee they are already collecting.

This would be so bold that I doubt it will happen from an existing print content vendor like NYTimes. Seems like something Amazon might do as a Prime benefit, though. Basically like Prime video, just for text.

> Basically like Prime video, just for text.

Or Netflix...

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