Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Our service offers all newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands on one website, and tries to reinvent the business model of journalism by making it incredibly easy to pay for separate articles. Users get €2,50 when they sign up and pay between €0,10 and €0,80 per article. When users click on an article, they automatically pay. And when they dislike what they read, they can instantly refund the article price.

Within Blendle, users can see what articles their friends or interesting curators (celebrities, journalists, politicians, radio DJ’s) have shared from the paid sections of today’s newspapers and magazines, and which articles are trending on the platform. The site also enables anyone to share articles from Holland’s best journalists on Facebook and Twitter. No more signing up with different paywalls for every newspaper....

...Tom Taylor, co-founder of Newspaper Club tells The Verge that tests of the service have so far been positive. PaperLater appears to be a love or hate service, says Taylor. "The reaction [has been] divided between 'OMG I've wanted this all my life' and 'Why on earth would you print out the internet?'"

PaperLater will never take the place of services like Pocket — even Taylor admits to using it alongside a similar app. Short articles suitable for a commute go to the app, longer articles get pushed to the weekend for reading with PaperLater. "It's about giving people the choice to take something offline, and making it really easy to do that." As odd a service as it may seem, PaperLater's existence isn't without precedent.  

Newspaper Club was founded with similar principles, and has been successfully running for years. Rather than offering an automated service like PaperLater, the site provides simple tools to create custom newspapers, and it's printed over four million newspapers since its formation in 2009....