>> They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard
Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) [1]:
"we broke the news of a major European bank’s involvement in illegal land grabs in some of the poorest regions of Europe; in another piece, our Technology and Surveillance Correspondent warned readers about the security risks of using public wifi networks; and our Hacker Correspondent demonstrated why you might want to think twice before posting photos of your children online. With these and other stories, we strive to provide readers with new perspectives for understanding how the world works."
Reading the rest, it seems the major reason for their success is their "expert community " and the access to that you get via subscription - altough i wonder how do they compare to other web based communities.
>Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter)
No, it was an aggregator, not a news outlet itself.
Can't find the original article I've read about the service, but it seems it is this:
That said, 40K paying members for something like this, considering the Dutch population is quite an achievement. That would be like 1 million people in the US.
But still, this Correspondent thing is nothing like what I described (and think will work as a solution) which would be an easy to pay, ad-free, aggregation platform.
But(from an article in business insider): "It may well be that Blendle has been so successful in the Netherlands because the publications that have signed up have been Dutch language, rather than English, in which articles are often replicated hundreds of times over. But Klöpping[the founder] believes the Netherlands is no different than any other country"
I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.
On top of that, if you want to replicate content in hebrew, you're probably an Israeli, you have more lucrative jobs. But many poor people in the third world do know english pretty well, and the english market is bigger, so there are enough people willing to do that job,
So the situation is very different. But sure it would be interesting to see how the u.s. expansion goes.
EDIT: one thing though - i see their most popular piece is an in depth analysis of how will middle east will look in 2035. Seems like something that might not fit ad-based content(it's too long, making it both hard to copy well, and not fit for ads, and also credibility of the author matters). Now i really want to see what kind of content this produces in english.
>I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.
Depends on the country I guess. I'm from another small country in the area, comparable to Holland in population, and we have tons of news sites (commercial) and lots of blogs. That said, we also had in the past 3 decades an overabundance of print outlets, so we might not be that typical.
Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) [1]:
"we broke the news of a major European bank’s involvement in illegal land grabs in some of the poorest regions of Europe; in another piece, our Technology and Surveillance Correspondent warned readers about the security risks of using public wifi networks; and our Hacker Correspondent demonstrated why you might want to think twice before posting photos of your children online. With these and other stories, we strive to provide readers with new perspectives for understanding how the world works."
Reading the rest, it seems the major reason for their success is their "expert community " and the access to that you get via subscription - altough i wonder how do they compare to other web based communities.
[1]https://medium.com/de-correspondent/dutch-journalism-platfor...