So this should be a lot higher than (cost of paper)/(number of articles)
Not sure that 40c is right, mind you, just that you can't really compare it to the total number of articles, if most people don't read most of them.
I think it'll always be a mix between micropayments and subscriptions: micropayments if you only read a little, subscriptions if you read a lot from a specific title.
What do I mean?
The benefits that we get from journalism are maximized if we have expert journalists – people who dedicate their lives to being good journalists.
Good journalists need stability. If they depend on the readership rates for individual articles, they are disencentivized to take the kinds of risks that a stable institution can afford to give them.
I don't know Blendle's long term plans in terms of supporting quality journalism – but the micropayment model is at odds with giving stability to individual journalists.
Hopefully this is something your are thinking about. How can we best support journalists – and not just individual peices of journalism?
I think you're right. I can't believe I never thought of like that before.
Let's say you buy an issue of the NYT. Are you actually going to read every bit of it, or are you going to focus on the articles that particularly interest you, skim the headlines for sections that are less important, and so on? If you only have to pay for what you read, suddenly the paper is making a lot less money.
This is an extremely difficult nut to crack but Blendle's is the best approach I have seen so far.
I think success will rely upon brand name content, a good preview so buyers know what they're getting, the auto-refund thing and 10-50c pricing per article.