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by kuisch
3739 days ago
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Really curious as to where this may go. On the one hand, I'm skeptical. It feels like there's simply too much friction for a commodity. And doing relatively well in the Dutch market is one thing. Being able to translate this to the English market is, of course, a different story entirely. On the other hand, being able to read individual articles from most of the major publications in one centralized environment is super compelling to me. Additionally, I feel like the iTunes comparison that's often made isn't entirely fair. Before iTunes, I believe there simply wasn't any viable (non-illegal) alternative to get an individual song. Whereas Blendle competes with, as mentioned before, loads of other free alternatives online. I'm sure this is appealing to a core group of fairly voracious readers, but wonder if it extrapolates to the wider population to such an extent as to sustain an actual business. Thus far, I believe I've only come across the number of registered users. This is obviously not very interesting and perhaps they're not allowed to disclose any other metrics. Especially with the free initial credit though, I guess you'll find plenty who would be willing to give it a spin. Would love to see DAUs and/or the percentage of people that tops up repeatedly after using initial credit. To be sure, I definitely hope they succeed. It seems like they've executed very well up to this point. |
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True, but these publishers can, at some point, start making their content accessible only through Blendle.
Curious loophole though - on platforms such as Pocket, one can go on Pocket's 'recommended' feed, save an NYT article straight to their own Pocket, and read the article on the Pocket platform, without every going to NYT.com (circumventing the paywall).
How is that legal? And if it remains legal, will this loophole be a major concern to Blendle and publishers?