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Blendle has some competition in the micropayment wars
BII
Blendle recently launched an app that lets readers pay an extremely small fee to read a story. But now it looks like a new contender has emerged in this space.
London-based micropayments company Tibit, which is just one year old, told Politico's Morning Media that it had completed a testing phase of its own app and has begun reaching out to potential media partners. The company expressed confidence that readers and publishers alike would prefer Tibit to Blendle.
“Unlike Blendle's walled-garden” within the app, Tibit allows the user to just click one button on a website to either unlock paid content or to leave a “tip” on the free content, according to senior developer Michael Sidon. Furthermore, “Tibit works globally; it's not restricted to local markets.”
But Tibit will need to gain ground against Blendle, which runs on more than $4 million in investments from The New York Times and Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer. Blendle boasts multiple high-profile media companies and has approximately 650,000 users.
Tibit, meanwhile, has raised more than $175,000 in a crowdfunding campaign and more than $150,000 in private investment, but has no media partners yet.
And both companies face the possibility that this micropayment model will not catch on for news content in the same way it has for music and television.
But publishers have started to embrace the premium model already. The New York Times has confirmed that it is considering offering a new premium digital subscription tier that would let subscribers view content without ads. The publisher has already started to become less reliant on ads to generate digital revenue.
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