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Comment by wolvoleo

15 hours ago

That shouldn't really be a problem if there's an intermediary that takes the payment and distributes it.

We had a service that did this in the Netherlands (Blendle). They had a lot of the big Dutch media titles on-board. It failed and they pivoted to a crappy subscription service.

The model just doesn't work at this point.

  • Inkl, on the other hand, is still alive and kicking. If you're ok with their selection of sources it's 9.99 per month o 99.99 per year. I still have a pay-per-read subscription, which I prefer to the subscription model, but I'm afraid they don't offer that anymore.

  • Yes I know blendle but this was decades ago. In a market that was completely different, where paywalls weren't yet a thing and they would just display ads. It was "ads vs paying a bit". Not really a big incentive.

    I think in this day and age where most news outlets simply give you a paywall I think this will work just fine. Because now the alternative is just not reading the content (or paying a sub which is ridiculous for a site you view a couple times a month)

    • Their hope with subscriptions is that there's value to you visiting more than a couple times per month.

      Anecdotally, this works for me - I pay for a handful of subs, and I don't use any news aggregators or feeds - the sites with subs I pay for cover everything of interest to me.