Blendle for Wordpress: a one click business model for freelance journalists
Sell your articles on your own website and publish them in Blendle? It’s now possible, with the Blendle plugin for Wordpress developed bij Reporters Online.
With over 600,000 readers in the Netherlands and an official US launch coming up, Blendle is developing into the most important platform for paid online quality journalism worldwide. It’s readers can use Blendle itself, and also a growing number of sites where they can pay with their Blendle account. They can buy any article that they like, on any site that uses Blendle. With one click. Without having to jump through seventeen digital hoops.
A number of larger publishers now use this ‘Blendle Button’ payment system. At Reporters Online, a cooperation that was founded to help freelance journalist to sell their articles online, we think that anybody that has interesting stuff to offer should be able to use this service: sell your articles directly to your readers, on your own website.
And as of now, you can! Reporters Online launches a (free) Wordpress plugin that allows you to install one-click payments on your site or sites. Made by Gyurka Jansen, with a little help from Blendle.
As Blendle-founder Marten Blankesteijn says: ‘The difficulties of paying for online journalism have irritated me for a long time. A subscription to a newspaper is much more work than a subscription to Spotify or Netflix. And readers who don’t want to subscribe but just read one interesting article, can only use Blendle. That’s why we have made our payment technology — including the famous money-back guarantee — available to anyone who wants to earn money online with journalism. Our payment system allows readers to pay for articles with just one click; soon we will also offer subscriptions. To traditional media, but also to freelance journalists who sell their products directly to readers, without the intervention of a publisher. We think that many more people will spend money on quality journalism when we make it easy for them to pay.’
How does it work?
You can use the Blendle plugin to sell articles on your (Wordpress) site or sites. Readers pay with their Blendle account. All you have to do, after installing the plugin and logging in, is check a box:
You can also use the plugin to publish your articles in Blendle itself, by using the ‘Send to Blendle website’ box. More information about what can — and, at present, cannot — be done is found here.
It’s been tested on 200-plus websites for user experience and bugfixing — we probably missed a few — and to see if and how ‘selling articles on your own site’ works. Not everything you’d want from a media payment system is possible at this time, but it will be shortly. And selling your articles works just fine.
To use the plugin you must register at Reporters Online. You can register here:
http://reportersonline.nl/register-to-use-our-pay-with-blendle-plugin/
After registration you’ll receive a download link.
Business model for freelance journalists
Journalism worldwide is in crisis, and freelancers suffer most. At Reporters Online, and earlier at De Nieuwe Pers (yeah, we still have those subscriptions too..), we think part of the answer is: publish yourself, be your own brand, make money on your own work. With the launch of the first good kiosk and payment system for unbundled articles, Blendle makes such an approach possible. For freelance journalists who want to (re)publish their stuff, but also for smaller publishers for whom maintaining their own payment system is too much work.
At this time we don’t know exactly how many readers will want to use the Blendle Button — we’ve just started out a couple of months ago. Our first indication is that with a semi-professional site, revenue of at least a few thousand euros/dollars per year is possible. In The Netherlands, that is — not a very big country. Most readers have no objection to paying with Blendle for articles that are worth their money — and Blendle’s money-back guarantee helps to remove the objections that they may have
That makes Blendle for Wordpress of the numerous new business models that are circulating in media maybe one of the best, and certainly one of the easiest. You give your work the value it deserves. With one click.
Questions? support@reportersonline.nl
PS The plugin will be available in the Wordpress plugin database somewhere around May 15th 2016. Wordpress only for now. Blendle Button is still in Dutch, work in progress.
