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Blendle is a Dutch news product that brings a younger generation of readers, who have never paid for journalism, a new way to buy high quality content.
Publishers are struggling as advertising revenues fall. This is causing them to desperately bait clicks or ask for subscriptions. Readers who want to stay current are left with a poor range of choices.
Blendle offers a new option that serves both reader and publication elegantly through great design and a business model enabled by technology. They have been called the Netflix or Spotify for journalism.
Blendle’s landing page value propositions speak to modern problems faced by those who consume news on digital platforms: “No filter bubbles. No Ads. No paywalls. Listening on the go.” These problems didn’t exist in the early days of classic publishers.
Nostalgia vs. Design
Comparing traditional magazines to Blendle’s approach. I disabled Ad Blocker for this article as this is the publication’s intended layout.
The New York Times and The Guardian’s web layouts are artefacts bound by tradition and subjugation to advertisers.
These are brands that have been riding upon the power of nostalgia for decades. Their readers’ loyalty stemming back to childhood memories. Nostalgia is a tactic we see many older
brands use.
Blendle, however, not bound to this tradition or advertisement can rethink the layout with visual clarity, better prioritisation of elements and a focus on the modern reader’s needs.
The once beneficial tether to the past is now what is holding these old papers back. Blendle leverages its digital origin to redefine news reading as an experience focused on the individual rather than a shotgun approach for the masses.
Blendle’s homepage article preview.
Blendle’s article previews are beautiful, overlaying the text onto the image tastefully allowing for a more visual browsing experience. The fallbacks for articles with no images display an animated, colourful background graphic.
Reading Context
A common news reading behaviour is to check in at different points of the day. Rather than being greeted with the same sprawl of articles and advertisements as we saw above, Blendle greets users by name and indicates the time of day.
Becoming Blendle’s news buddy
This is a simple feature that reveals a lot about Blendle’s values. It adds a human feeling to the product and reinforces itself as a personalised service rather than the old approach, which is like a digital version of yelling the news out in the street to passersby.
Refunds for News
Advertising isn’t fundamentally bad but when advertising is a core business model of a service the incentive is to simply drive as many page-views as possible. This can conflict with principles of ethical journalism. Breaking this down:
Advertisement funded news outlets have strong incentive to:
1. Write shocking, click-baiting headlines that appeal to basic emotions (fear / anger).
2. Manipulate content to fit headlines.
3. Tell people only what they want to hear.
They also lack incentive to:
1. Provide value beyond the headline.
2. Provide truth and well-researched stories.
3. Make convincing arguments for the truth.
Blendle tries to balance these incentives by:
1. Making each article cost a small amount of money (~$.15).
2. Giving users the ability to easily get immediate refunds for articles they don’t like for any reason.
3. Giving users refunds if they click out of the article too soon
This modal appears if you leave an article too quickly to have possibly read it (varies based on length of the article).
Refunds are not a new concept. The application to news articles and time-based automation of the refund is though. This results in a higher return on each article for publishers, less of a need to publish news that appeals to the widest possible audience, and more incentive to provide meaningful value up until the last word. This is a shift in power in favour of the consumer similar to how we saw with KakaoBank.
Typographic Humility
But Blendle still has the problem of appealing to publishers to join their platform. When bundling them in with other publications, there’s a loss of individual status and brand power.
One of the fantastic ways Blendle deals with this is by using custom typography true to the original brand in each article.
Blendle’s different type treatment for different publications .
This emphasises the publication’s brand, maintaining its status and ensuring its history is not forgotten in the new era of aggregation. If Blendle had gone with a one-size-fits-all strategy, it may have been a less convincing idea for the brands to jump onto the platform.
This also results in a beautifully diverse user experience when compared with other platforms that treat the type the same across all their providers.
Inkl, a direct competitor to Blendle showing articles with the same treatment.
Premium
Despite the aforementioned new pay-per-article model, Blendle has now started testing a premium subscription model in their home country of Holland.
A monthly subscription model is not only more familiar to users because of Spotify and Netflix but also less complicated than managing different pricing for each article.
Whether this model will be more successful and rolled out worldwide is yet to be seen. If so it will definitely be a lesson in sticking to convention with pricing.
Below are some of the changes. Instead of refunds, at the end of each article users can leave simple feedback.
The prompt at the end of articles changed from “get your money back” to “didn’t like this article? Click here and we’ll make Blendle better for you”
Article previews also no longer show price, but show hearts people gave.
The homepage structure changes too, giving readers the option to listen to news as the primary highlight. The voice is read by a real person (or a very convincing simulated voice), with light background music and audio skeuomorphism with a page-turning sound for each article.
Voice in Blendle Premium.
The news is then gathered into topics called “Your updates”. These are colourful, emoji bubbles aesthetically similar to a modern social media product’s UI. The red dots and numbers cause a psychological itch that needs to be scratched. This is a new, lightly gamified way of browsing articles that attempts to fit in with its audience’s habitual notification clearing behaviour from apps like Facebook and Instagram.
Topic groups in Blendle Premium.
The premium model’s website also comes with a trendy brand repaint including darker blacks and a bolder red gradient
Appeals to Subscribe
It’s interesting to see the different ways companies have tried to get their readers to start paying. There’s the New York times “metering”, wherein you get 5 free articles before you have to start paying.
The other approach is a more values-based appeal. Papers in the UK, for example, are known for leaning more strongly conservative or liberal and their appeal for subscriptions reflect this.
Below for example is a more liberal paper, The Guardian’s appeal to the readership’s fundamental ideology – distribution of wealth to those who need it – in order to drive subscriptions. You pay so those that can’t can still read for free.
The Guardian’s values based call for subscriptions that appears at the bottom of each article.
The Telegraph, on the other hand, when asking for subscriptions makes the offer about attending exclusive events and getting access to expert articles. The Telegraph’s copy appeals to more conservative beliefs wherein wealth brings the individual value, hoping this will resonate with their reader and drive subscriptions.
The Telegraph’s call for subscriptions.
Blendle can’t appeal to these values as it must remain ideologically neutral as a platform. Their subscription benefits are about functionality and convenience: Listen-on-the-go. Personalisation. No advertisements.
Blendle’s call for subscriptions.
By focusing on scale and convenience, digital products like Blendle reflect our practical needs so well, but less so our higher level ideals. It’s unclear what the long-term impact of this could be. Some say that by trying to escape these smaller ideologies (often labelled filter bubbles in a digital context), we may just be moving into one larger monocultural bubble enabled by technology that has less diversity or conflict of thought.
In Zigzag we saw that focusing on altering the structure of the product to serve the group it connected more deeply. Could a well-designed news aggregation product that focused on one set of ideas be more successful?
Blendle and the Future of News
Blendle claims that based on their data from Holland, it has no negative impact on subscriptions when publications sign up. The New York Times, among others, have joined Blendle, perhaps believing that there are just some users that don’t like single-publication subscriptions and the pay-per-article is some additional revenue they wouldn’t have had anyway.
From the New York Times’ own 2020 vision report: “The New York Times has staked its future on being a destination for readers — an authoritative, clarifying and vital destination”. It says “a” destination and not “the” destination, so perhaps they are open to collaboration with other platforms.
In the document, the NYTimes also envisions a focus on high impact, rich media experiences that only digital platforms can provide – leaderboards, live updates, interaction, graphics, and so on – custom features that go beyond just text and photography.
These rich editorial experiences may become the selling point of a one-publication subscription and Blendle subscriptions could exist separately as the destination for classic articles. The two parties may be able to progress without stepping on each other’s toes.
Certainly reading the news from Blendle rather than advertisement driven sources, the stories feel better curated, more valuable and leave you feeling satiated in your desire to learn and feel up-to-date and less unnecessarily negative or angry about the state of the world.
As people become more aware of the need to control their information diet, Blendle may become the platform of choice.
Takeaways
- Remain ideologically neutral if you’re trying to be a platform.
- On the other hand if your product’s audiences are defined around certain beliefs, orient the structure and messaging around that, even pricing strategies.
- Leverage nostalgia (either of your brand itself or of your product area) until it starts hurting you.
- Beware of how your product’s incentives may change with an advertising model.
- When aggregating different brands into a platform, treat them with respect by displaying their brand as true to the original as possible. (You may have noticed we do this a bit at Under Glass too)
- Turning content consumption into “tasks to complete” style UI can create sticky habits.
- Use personal, contextual (time, location) messaging with a casual tone to appeal to the younger, digital native market. Also emojis.
Questions
- Technology solves problems but also brings newer ones. Blendle is an example of a solution to new problems. What other problems has technology created for you?
