Will It Blendle?
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Blendle, the Dutch micropayments + news aggregator, launched their iOS and Android apps. They’re solid — well built, carefully designed, if a little buggy in places (still technically beta). Articles are native and fast, the navigation can be a bit tricky. It feels like a mix of the old Adobe Digital Editions apps that every publisher launched on the iPad and newer efforts like Apple News or Facebook Instant Articles.
Blendle’s approach is pay a little for only what you read, a la carte style, instead of having to subscribe to both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to get through their paywalls. The idea reminds me a bit of cable TV, which everyone complained about being too expensive, insisting what they really wanted was just to pay for the channels (or shows even!) that they actually watch. Of course, as cord cutters have learned, this approach doesn’t actually turn out to be all that great of a deal and maybe socialism, Comcast style is not all that terrible.
Most Blendle articles cost $0.19, with a few publishers like The Journal going as high as $0.49. That adds up pretty quickly if you’re even an average reader.
Which begs the question: what problem is Blendle solving for readers. Sure, there’s an abstract argument about needing to pay for quality journalism, which ultimately serves readers, but this does not a compelling product make. Blendle is solving publishers problems, making the classic mistake of starting with cool tech and trying to build a product instead of starting with the customer experience and working backwards to the technology.
I see two possible paths for Blendle. The first is to become the best possible news reader, period. Let users subscribe to any publication, add an Instapaper-style “read it later” function that works from anywhere, improve the Nuzzle-style social graph recommendation engine, and then make the micropayments a feature for paywalled-publications. Yes, this means they are competing directly with Facebook and Twitter and Apple News, but they’re competing against them anyway. Let readers decide if they want the ad-supported model of Facebook or micropayments.
The other option is to make the micropayments a platform that can be used inside of other apps, like Facebook. Platforms are, of course, incredibly hard to pull off as a product, and pits them against not only the whims of Apple and Facebook but payment processors like Stripe, not to mention the new players like Ethereum.
Thiel’s Gulch
Peter Thiel vs. Gawker is now Silicon Valley vs. The Media in a turn that is as familiar as it is predictable, owing in no small part to the failure of those two very institutions. Lines have been drawn, sides taken, now we wait to see who will “win”. As in all us-vs-them battles, truths will be lost in the misunderstanding of either side.
Tech has the advantage of a sympathetic case on their side, namely the prurience of Gawker’s claim. Thiel’s defenders have spun this into a narrative about the failure of “clickbait” journalism replacing “real” news and some not-terribly-convincing handwringing about the state of the media (you know, the media Silicon Valley has gleefully and rather profitably decimated over the past two decades).
But concern-trolling over clickbait is to miss Gawker’s actual mission: to poke a stick in the eye of the rich and powerful. In this regard, Gawker is following a fairly grand, and, yes, salacious, tradition of afflicting the comfortable by any means necessary. Gawker has rather broadly defined “afflict” and “comfortable” to mean, roughly, “piss off” and “anyone with a bit of money”. It’s how they justify, say, outing a married C-level exec at a major publishing company.
Furthermore, Gawker has long understood that celebrity, even for a has-been like Hulk Hogan, is cultural currency. Tarnishing that veneer of celebrity at any cost may be as close to a mission statement as we’ll get from Nick Denton.
Understanding Silicon Valley’s rationale (and defensiveness) can be a bit trickier, the best I’ve been able to come up with is this: tech, in many ways, does not see itself as the winner. Not just against media, tech has taken over everything and has so far faced very little of the kind of public resistance that their analogs in, say, finance have. Furthermore, because tech changes so quickly, the very idea of winning is fleeting, so the kings of tech steel themselves for constant battle. And once they are on top, they scorch the earth to make sure no one can challenge their supremacy. Then, inevitable tectonic shifts happen and the ground below them crumbles and there’s a new boy king no one ever saw coming.
This, I imagine, is why tech sees media meddling or government regulation not as costs of doing business in a free society but as existential threats that need to be razed. Today’s tech titans are fighting every minute to avoid becoming the next Yahoo, they have no patience for unenlightened bureaucrats or snarky bloggers.
What’s troubling about all of this is that tech has always insisted that they are different — they’re building the future, they insist, not fouling the earth or repackaging subprime mortgages like the robber barons of old. They ask us to trust them as they remake the world in their image, yet they have put none of the structures in place to self-enforce any accountability. When they’re called on it — as Gawker so often did — they wave their hands about the free market.
The very rich, as Fitzgerald quipped, are still different from you and me. What this new gilded age tells us is they are in no way different from how they’ve ever been.
A Buzz and a Bell
Vanity Fair just launched The Hive, a “new site covering business, technology, and politics, and the egos at play in each.” If that sounds familiar, it’s certainly a less snarky version of Gawker’s beat, and familiar territory for VF, minus the fashion spreads. It’s a sharp site and a smart play, both in terms of speaking to a growing audience increasingly skeptical of monied power, and finding new advertisers. They launched with a banger from Nick Bilton cataloging the trials of Jack Dorsey’s third go as Twitter’s CEO, and a bit of a dud trying to spin … something about succession at The Times.
I’m also quite curious to watch how The Hive overlaps with Wired, both being part of the Condé Nast family. Shared interests are to be expected amongst siblings but these two seem particularly close. Especially since Wired stopped reporting on the future some time ago, now that we’re living in the future they predicted, and are instead covering business, technology, politics, and the egos etc.
Bill Simmons’s The Ringer also launched, on Medium, and he would really prefer if you didn’t call it Grantland 2.0. Like that other site, this one’s sure to be a must read (or must hate-read) as one small part of the great Simmons media empire.
Sidebar
• A few reports that are almost certainly relevant to your interests:
- Mary Meeker’s annual internet trends deck is up, dense with facts and figures as ever. I’m guessing you already know you need to at least flip through this.
- Pew on news use across social media in 2016 (spoiler: Facebook rules all).
- The Knight Foundation on mobile first in newsrooms.
- Pagefair, a company that helps publishers route around adblockers, has what looks to be a good report onmobile adblocking. Interesting to note how widely used adblockers are in the developing world, where bandwidth is scarce and expensive.
• We once optimistically, and rather naively, thought that the internet detected censorship as damage and routed around it. Internet censorship, however, has been pretty effective in China. More bad news: China’s online propaganda machine is even more subtle and effective than we imagined.
• A food publishing startup — this is basically the venn diagram of my ideal life so I’m obligated to link to Christopher Kimball’s new project Milk Street Kitchen. Kimball is not just striking out on his own but reconsidering how and what he writes about.
• Hyperdev, from Fog Creek (the team that built Trello), is a sandbox for trying Node.js apps. It’s all containerized with zero setup — you can just start configuring and coding an app right in their IDE and then connect it to Github to save your work. Great way to test out an idea without having to set up AWS or Heroku.
• The core tech behind annotation startup Genius was built on a massive security hole.
• Microsoft and Facebook are stretching a cable from Virginia Beach to Bilbao called MAREA to speed up their cloud infrastructures. “MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic — featuring eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps.“
• Netflix built their own bandwidth test page and gave it the perfect domain name: fast.com. It’s fast, it’s ad-free, and it doesn’t use Flash!
• Last week I pointed out that Buzzfeed has some of the best reporting of the seismic shift happening in the economy, with their coverage Uber, Airbnb, et al. At almost that very moment, Vice’s tech blog Motherboard was launching a week-long series looking at all things Uber. It’s pretty good! Well, mostly.
• The Digital Humanities + Data Journalism Symposium looks great. Helluva speaker lineup.
• Kind of a weird comparison but sure, why not: How many stories do news orgs publish each day? The Washington Post produces more stories per day than The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal combined.
• Speaking of the Post, I don’t think I knew they licensed their CMS, Arc Publishing. Canada’s paper of record just signed on and is now their largest client in North America.
• Optimizely is a pretty widely used client-side A/B testing tool, deployed by websites of all stripes, including media companies testing alternate headline treatments. Turns out! Optimizely’s tests are pretty easy for anyone to read. Enter Pessimizely, a Chrome plugin that shows you the Optimizely A/B tests a site is running.
• The Awl is now fully platformed, having moved their entire archive and pointed their DNS to Medium. Ultimately, I think it’s a smart move, though no less sad. New York readers, buy Matt and John a drink and venmo me the receipt would ya? (Offer good for one drink seriously I can’t afford New York liquor prices.)
• Possible lessons from CNN’s Facebook Bot. Most interesting to me was learning that CNN farmed their bot out to Outbrain. Yes, Outbrain, king of the chumbox. Related: Tyler Cowen on ad bots and “brand anthropomorphism”.
• I can’t decide on my favorite story this week: The Times on ice cream truck turf wars or The Guardian on how an abandoned ship full of synthesizers marooned off the coast of Africa led to a new genre of music.
• Are you subscribed to The New Yorker Minute? I highly recommend it! I also recommend their review of Nathan Heller’s Oberlin piece, possibly as A Substitute For Reading The Book Article.
• This Vox video explainer deconstructing Hip Hop is actually, improbably great.
