Exploring a News Subscription service with Kendraio
Imagine a world where you could pay for all your news in one place by simply registering only once. Imagine if you could support a collection of news publishers and journalists simultaneously with one payment, easily and simply.
Our first reaction might be to say: let’s build a platform that can host all the news content in one place, like a Netflix for news. But what if we wanted to have all the news publishers keep their own identity and their own control over their own websites and apps? Then you might think about using crypto or blockchain technologies to provide the answer.
Sonja is running Časoris, an award-winning non-profit online newspaper for children. She reached out to the Kendraio team to discuss her frustrations. You can read more in her post on LinkedIn. At Kendraio, we love frustrations. We are founded on frustrations and a desire to make things work better. So, we started thinking…
And here’s where we’ve got to so far with our thinking… What if users could pay in one place monthly or annually? With that they can choose who and what they support and what content they get access to. So, the agreement that they sign up to, when they pay, will be tailor made to their own specification. For instance, I just want to support local news publishers or journalists who write about a particular topic. That’s a great goal but potentially complex — so perhaps we start off much simpler but keep this end-goal in mind to guide us there.
We imagined a solution that is really simple and easy to maintain and offers access to loads of news in other places all over the world. We liked the idea so much we submitted our proposal to Google. We just heard back from Google and found out that we didn’t get the grant this time. But that’s OK, we think that this is a great idea and we are going to do it anyway ourselves.
So, what are the components of our solution if all the publishers and journalists remain autonomous and in control of their own publications via their own websites and mobile apps? Where can Kendraio add value? Currently, there are attempts to eat this problem, such as Coil and Kachingle (looks like it might be dead though). And Google has been quietly trialing their very own subscription service since 2018. But how can we build something that doesn’t get in the way, isn’t an all-or-nothing approach, and is really truly decentralised? And remember Kendraio isn’t a service provider so we don’t want paying clients, we want partners and collaborators who understand the need for innovative solutions and freedom for all parties involved.
We’re still in a research mode about possible solutions. One way could be to create a distributed accounting process over the top of the existing payment systems that each publisher already has operational. So, there is no new organisation to set up to administer the system, and there are no new bank accounts to set up to hold the funds — and so avoiding governance complexities. Publishers collect subscriptions from users. Users can specify the terms of their subscription detailing access to special content and from which publishers. Publishers then send a proportion of the subscription on to the other publishers defined in the user agreement for the specific subscription.
Now, one of the potential problems with this is the overhead of bank transfers needed as cash flows from publisher to another publisher. There could be a lot of bank transfers needed, and that’s way too much admin just for one subscription. However, there’s a trick here. News subscriptions are pretty unique in the business world. They’re kind of a bonus. No journalist needs real-time payments so they can be packaged up into bulk batches. Once a month or even every 3 months is fine. Just so long as the money comes eventually. So, this payment run might only need to be done a few times a year. That seems doable in terms of admin overhead. And there’s an added benefit that if two publishers owe each other money then only one transaction will need to take place because the larger ‘owe’ will cancel out the smaller one and only the balance will need to actually go through the banking system. This system is complex but that’s why we use computers to work it all out for us.
There could be gotchas like trust within the network, and what happens if a member of the subscription network goes ‘away’ with some cash? Well, the nice thing about having a decentralised system (that’s a system with no centre) is that there is no centre. In a centralised system you have a central hub that manages all the communication and flow of resources. But if this central hub breaks then the whole system breaks. In a decentralised system you don’t have a centre but you do have lots of nodes all operating independently. And if one of the nodes breaks then the rest of the system can still carry on without much of a hiccup. This decentralised network topology is actually the whole architectural model of the Internet — it’s built to mitigate network outage risks. There’s no way to ever have a completely risk free system but building resilient systems by design is part of what Kendraio does.
As luck would have it, about a month after we submitted our idea to Google, I received an update from a friend (Dil) who said he was working on Local Loop. Now what’s really hilarious (in a serendipitous kind of way) about Local Loop is that it is pretty much a living example of the distributed cash system that I specified for news subscriptions. So, this idea might be validated before we even start designing the system in detail. I love the way the Universe works! ;-)
For the last few years Kendraio has been creating personal dashboard applications for individuals and team members. For this news subscription system we’re assuming Kendraio will create dashboards for team members of the publication to view and manage incoming subscriptions and the whole accounting system. Also, individual consumers will need dashboards to manage their subscriptions and view what they have paid for across multiple vendors/publishers.
If you are interested in working with Sonja and Kendraio on this idea then please contact Sonja if you are a journalist or publisher, she would love to hear your pain or vision or experience. And please contact Daniel if you are a developer or technology provider wishing to get involved. We look forward to hearing any comments or questions you might have about our proposal.
