[jillesvangurp]

I've been following them for as long as they've existed. Their business model with per article payments never made sense to me. And those 100K articles that they sold is a clear indication that this is not working. That's not users but articles sold for something like 25 cents. 25K in revenue in other words. That's nothing and they ve been citing the same number for years.

60K subscriptions is not nothing but of course not a lot of revenue either; though 600K/month does sound it should be able to sustain a small company and if you can grow that it can actually turn into substantial revenue. Of course, like with Spotify, a lot would flow directly to the publishers.

Blendle has always danced around the one thing they can't deliver which is a subscription service that offers access to all/most relevant news articles currently locked behind paywalls of the few surviving news papers that struggle to make money this way (most of them are failing or just getting by).

The likes of the New York times seem to be doing ok-ish because they are big enough to still be able to produce quality news and have a large number of subscribers. Most of the rest has given up on the notion entirely by either focusing on dwindling paper sales, or ad driven news on web sites, or like the Guardian calling for donations. It's a race to the bottom.

So, I hope they succeed but I'm pessimistic about their chances. This doesn't sound like a winning formula.

[Tobias42]

The article didn't say that they sold 100000 articles, but that they have 100000 users that payed for individual articles. We don't know how many articles those users bought on average, but probably much more than one.