[JeanMertz]

Our founder, Alexander, just announced this on Business Insider's IGNITION event.

You can add yourself to our beta invite list at https://launch.blendle.com. We're really looking forward to next year!

Let me know if you have any questions.

[intopieces]

Do you require users to purchase a certain number of credits up front after the trial? I see you offer refunds if you don't like the story. What prevents a person from just reading all they like and then asking for a refund? Is it possible to copy and paste text from the articles to share on social media? (I assume you have a share mechanism, but this is more specific). Once I pay for the article, does it stay in my account forever, or could it be pulled by the publisher?

The service looks very interesting, and I look forward to trying it.

[JeanMertz]

Interesting questions.

Re: Do you require users to purchase a certain number of credits up front after the trial?

The "trial" is really $2,50 that we give you upon signup. You get another $2,50 after your first "top up". We show the prices in your own currency, so no "credits", but top-ups start at $5, and go up from there. You can choose to auto-topup when your wallet drops below $0.

Re: I see you offer refunds if you don't like the story. What prevents a person from just reading all they like and then asking for a refund?

The refund mechanism is an important tool to generate trust with the reader. We don't want you to feel "nickel-and-dimed" and if publisher promised a certain article through the heading and intro, but didn't live up to those expectations after reading the article, we encourage you to refund, and tell the publishers why you asked a refund (through a dialog), so publishers can learn as well.

We have certain mechanisms in place to prevent abuse of this system, but we're lenient, and in general we see only about 10% of purchases are refunded this way.

Re: Is it possible to copy and paste text from the articles to share on social media? (I assume you have a share mechanism, but this is more specific).

You can. Again, it's built on a mutual-trust system. So far it has worked out great, if we ever notice the balance tipping, we'll have to tweak the system.

Re: Once I pay for the article, does it stay in my account forever, or could it be pulled by the publisher?

It does stay in your account. We don't have any mechanism to actually remove articles from our platform. Highly occasionally, we remove the content of an article, because it was published by accident (f.e. a newspaper delivering next days newspaper too early, and it containing the score of a pre-recorded contest).

[intopieces]

Thank you for your reply! One more question: there was some kerfuffle about The New York Times changing a story they had already published [0]. Will your platform allow this? I find it to be highly unethical, but I could see publishers demanding to have that ability. To put it simply, there is value in publications printing retractions, and I hate to see them go in favor of sneaky edits.

[0]http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/360545/new-york-times-...

[rogeryu]

As content is visible via your webbrowser as well, copying content is possible that way, even if the app doesn't allow it.

What happened to the articles from the Volkskrant that were removed because the editor copied them from elsewhere? Are they removed from Blendle?

[mynewtb]

What about privacy? Do you link my name to what I read? Do you analyse that? Do you provide that to third parties?

[kardos]

Indeed. I don't have a reference handy, but have read that the revenue for online advertising on news articles is south of 5 cents per reader. Paying an order of magnitude more to buy out the advertising "experience" must also come with some privacy guarantees, else it will be a hard sell. It is the tracking (+malware, etc) issues that are driving the recent adblocker surge after all.

[JeanMertz]

Once the beta launches, the privacy statement can easily be accessed in English. But for now, here's how it starts:

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Blendle takes your privacy very seriously, and will process and use your information carefully. We keep it safe, and hidden from third parties. Since we don't have any ads, there's no need for us to collect data to sell ads.

To use Blendle, all you need is a valid email address. Of course we (no one else, mind you) are interested in getting to know you a little better in order to make your Blendle experience even more amazing. For example: our head honcho Alexander lives in Amsterdam, but was born in Oss. So what we'd like to do, is show him news articles from Oss and Amsterdam newspapers in his Blendle article list first. There are many other ways to tailor Blendle to what you want based on your information, but of course we'll only use your info to do so if you're totally okay with it.

Most companies have privacy statements of countless A4-sized pages, written in a way neither you nor we can understand. We think that's ridiculous, which is why we've asked our lawyer to use as much normal language in the text below as possible. Using a down-to-earth writing style is pretty tough for lawyers, but he did a pretty good job.

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