Alexander Klöpping, co-founder of Blendle | Mark Horn Fourth Estate The Dutch tech whiz who could save journalism Alexander Klöpping is taking his vision for a journalistic iTunes to the US.

UTRECHT, The Netherlands — Alexander Klöpping turned up to his first meeting at the New York Times late, alone, and not entirely sure why he had been summoned to a conference room with a dozen newspaper executives.

It was March 2014, still weeks before he and his co-founder Marten Blankesteijn would launch Blendle, a Dutch technology platform that aspires to do for newspapers and magazines what Apple’s iTunes did for music: encourage a generation of young Internet users to pay for journalism online.

The backpack-wearing Dutch entrepreneur may have been awestruck and unprepared, but he made a strong impression. The Times offered to invest in his fledgling company, which gives users a mechanism to buy individual newspaper and magazine articles online for a small, one-off fee.

“I wasn’t even sure if people in Holland were going to like it,” Klöpping said. “Thinking about the United States was very far away.”

Less than two years later, after debuting in the Netherlands and Germany, Blendle is on the verge of importing its iTunes-style micropayment model to the U.S.. If it works, it will add a new and potentially rich seam for a publishing industry that is desperately searching for more ways to generate revenue online as their traditional print income collapses.

'It's become completely normal to pay for music and movies online. Yet I don't have a single friend who pays for journalism' — Alexander Klöpping.

In recent years, as publishers including the New York Times, the Times of London and Le Monde erected payment barriers to shore up their businesses, readers in Europe and America have become accustomed, if grudgingly, to paying to read articles on their computers and smartphones. As Klöpping sees it, that has created an opening for a mechanism through which readers can easily discover, access and pay for the best work from a variety of publications that require digital subscriptions.

The time is ripe, he argues, for journalism to adopt the sort of universal, paid-for aggregation platform that has become the norm in other media sectors. “It’s become completely normal to pay for music, with Spotify. It’s become completely normal to pay for movies, with Netflix,” he said. “Yet I don’t have a single friend who pays for journalism.”

Klöpping is adamant that his millennial peers will open their wallets for journalism, too, as long as it’s fairly priced and effortless.

Blendle provides a “digital kiosk” that allows users to read individual stories from a range of publications, chosen by a combination of algorithms and human editors who wade through dozens of headlines every morning. A simple, elegant reading interface mimics the typefaces of the respective publications’ print editions. Users add credit to their “wallet” and only pay for the articles they read (Blendle takes a 30 percent cut); and if they’re not happy with an article, they can get their money back.

In an era awash with clickbait, in which publishers have lost control of distribution to technology companies like Facebook and Google, Blendle is an ambitious bet that there is an enduring market for the sort of costly, time-consuming public interest journalism that is necessary in a liberal democracy.

Antidote to clickbait

So far, Blendle has signed up about 650,000 users in Holland and Germany, about a fifth of whom have paid for articles. Crucially for publishers, roughly half the users are under 35, giving them an avenue to attract a valuable demographic that they typically struggle to reach. Media companies that have made their articles available in those markets include newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and de Volkskrant and the news magazine Der Spiegel. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Economist are also in the mix.

The stories that do well, Klöpping said, tend to be long interviews, opinion pieces, and intensively-reported investigations, while the sort of clickbait that thrives on social media — and which so many publishers have made central to their digital output — is often punished by requests for refunds.

For the U.S. launch, expected in the spring, Blendle has signed up a “really, really incredible” list of publishers, Klöpping said, although he refused to discuss specifics. (The New York Times, presumably, is among them, but would not comment on its involvement. “We’ve been closely following their progress,” said Times spokeswoman Abbe Serphos.)

"When challenged to pay, most people will bounce off" — Alan Mutter, digital media consultant.

Publishing executives and media analysts are watching the move closely, with a mix of hopefulness, wariness and skepticism. Publishers “will want to be sure Blendle will generate incremental new revenues and help introduce a new generation of readers who could become digital subscribers,” said Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher who co-founded the paywall software Press+.

“My sense is if they get enough publishers on board at the outset, they can do this,” said Benoit Wirz of the Knight Foundation, a Florida-based journalism non-profit.

One big question: Can Blendle cross over into the all-important English-language markets where it will have to compete with an abundance of online journalism, often very good, that is already available for free?

“Europeans are more accustomed to paying higher prices for quality content” than Americans, according to Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Alan Mutter, a California-based digital media consultant, said that while a handful of prominent publications, such as the New York Times, have had success at attracting paid digital subscribers (more than a million in the the Times’ case), the vast majority of Internet users won’t tolerate a price tag on their reading.

“The biggest obstacle is that people don’t like to pay for content,” Mutter said. “When challenged to pay, most people will bounce off.”

Some media executives, however, are willing to try just about everything. Micropayments could be just one part of a multi-pronged distribution strategy that also includes making articles available for free through Apple News, Facebook’s Instant Articles and Google’s new rapidly-loading mobile pages.

“It was a relatively low-risk experiment for us to see how micropayments work,” Robin Raven, a vice president of product management at the Economist, said in an interview. “Everything is in flux, so it’s not like there are any slam dunk answers.”

Who are these kids?

On a wet, gloomy recent Friday, Klöpping was running 10 minutes late for a meeting at Blendle’s head office in Utrecht, a small city about 20 miles from Amsterdam. He slung his backpack to the concrete floor, next to a stack of cardboard boxes that had yet to be unpacked.

Blendle moved into the premises not long before Christmas. Their previous office had become so cramped, after a year-and-a-half in which the staff mushroomed to 70, that some employees had to sit on the floor to work. The new office, though, was the sort of spacious, playful, industrial-style interior that looks as if it was plucked from a startup design brochure: concrete and plywood, everyone in jeans and hoodies, a foosball table.

Klöpping, in khakis, sneakers and a navy sweater with a large yellow “A” embroidered on the front, sat awkwardly on a swivel chair, one leg tucked beneath him. He claims to be naturally shy, a classic computer nerd, but comes across as quietly self-confident, sharp and witty. In the last few years, he’s become a regular at media conferences, giving interviews and hobnobbing with publishing moguls. “I have become social,” he said.

Klöpping, 29, grew up in Oss, a small city in the south of the Netherlands. As a teenager, he preferred spending time on the Internet to hanging out with other people his age. At 15, he and a friend started importing electronic gadgets from China — lie detectors, radio-controlled helicopters — and sold them online.

After leaving school, he spent a year studying at a couple of small liberal arts colleges in America, then did a degree in media and culture at the University of Amsterdam. While still studying, Klöpping began writing for a Dutch financial blog, 925.nl. A succession of other journalism roles followed after he left university, including as a technology pundit for NRC.next, a youth-focused tabloid newspaper, and on a TV chat show, De Wereld Draait Door (“The World Keeps Turning”).

In 2011, Klöpping received an email out of the blue from Blankesteijn setting out a vision for a journalism platform based on micropayments. Blankesteijn, a former newspaper journalist who is the same age as Klöpping, had approached several publishers with the concept but failed to drum up much enthusiasm. Klöpping, too, was skeptical when he first heard it, and initially ignored Blankesteijn’s approach. But Blankesteijn persisted, and they soon became close friends.

"Most websites are a pain in the ass to use because of all the ads" — Klöpping.

Initially, the pair collaborated on another online initiative, the Universiteit van Nederland (University of the Netherlands), a non-profit that broadcasts videos of TED-like academic lectures. NEMO, the science museum in Amsterdam, gave them an office to work on it, where Blankesteijn continued to tinker with the Blendle concept. Eventually, Klöpping came to be convinced of its potential and they shifted their focus to developing the payment platform. (Today, they control about 75 percent of Blendle between them. Blankesteijn tends to focus more on day-to-day operations, Klöpping said, while he handles relationships with publishers, plans the U.S. launch, and acts as the public face of the company.)

The product arose partly out of frustration that they were missing out on good articles in magazines and newspapers to which they didn’t have subscriptions. To a couple of young digital natives used to being able to painlessly access music and movies on the Internet, it didn’t make sense that their only choices were to read freely-available articles on websites that were purely supported by advertising or take out expensive monthly subscriptions.

“You have to go through forms and do subscriptions, and with every website you have to register again,” said Klöpping. “Most websites are a pain in the ass to use because of all the ads. So we started thinking, what if we built this from scratch?”

With a €200,000 grant from a Dutch government innovation fund, they refined the prototype and began showing it to publishers in the Netherlands. At first, no one bit. Some publishers worried that the platform, if it took off, would undermine their subscription revenues. Others didn’t think there would be enough demand. And some just didn’t think the 20-something pair could pull it off.

“I think for sure they thought, ‘Who are these two?’” Klöpping said. “They didn’t understand why I or Marten were doing this.”

Eventually, though, after refining the platform, they convinced one of the leading Dutch media companies, NRC Media, whose titles include the daily NRC Handelsblad, to sign up. After that, it “became a snowball,” Klöpping said.

In February 2014, as they prepared to launch Blendle in Holland, they were approached by executives from Axel Springer, the Germany media group whose newspapers include BILD, Europe’s biggest-selling tabloid, and Die Welt.

Axel Springer has been aggressively trying to pivot from its traditional print business to faster-growing digital media, with investments in numerous startups, including a share in POLITICO’s Europe edition and control of the financial publication Business Insider. Its executives had heard about Blendle and were keen to take a look.

According to Christoph Keese, an executive vice president at Axel Springer, the German company had concluded it was only a matter of time before a micropayment model emerged for journalism. “We felt that we should be ahead of the curve,” he said in an interview. (Keese sits on the board of POLITICO Europe.)

In October 2014, five months after launching in Holland, Blendle announced that Axel Springer and the New York Times had invested €3 million between them for 23 percent of the shares in the startup, implying a €13 million valuation. None of the companies involved would discuss precise figures, but Axel Springer’s shareholding is believed to be larger than that of the Times.

'It's worth a try'

Not everyone was convinced of Blendle’s potential.

One doubter was Frédéric Filloux, a French media analyst whose weekly email, the Monday Note, is closely followed by European media executives. The promise of additional revenues from a journalistic iTunes was too good for harrowed newspaper groups to ignore — “Like handing out Zmapp doses in an Ebola ward,” he wrote — but the concept, in his view, was doomed. Publishers wouldn’t be able to generate enough revenue from occasional micro-payments to risk undercutting their subscription income. And Blendle wouldn’t scale into English: There was too much free competition for readers to want to pay for it.

A year later, Filloux gave a more favorable assessment. “Blendle’s execution is absolutely remarkable,” he said in a column in October, after the product’s debut in Germany. He was impressed by the look and feel, the ease of the payment system. It was more sophisticated than he had realized.

In an interview, Filloux said his initial doubts “remain valid,” and that he is still not convinced of Blendle’s long-term potential. But he now thinks it’s at least worth publishers giving it a try. “I tend to judge start-ups by the way they are executing things, and I think these guys are very serious,” he said.

Among several other media analysts and publishers who spoke to POLITICO, there was a sense that, at best, Blendle will be a small, additional source of income for newspaper and magazine companies — not the game-changer that the industry badly needs.

Previous attempts to create online newsstands have failed to take flight. News Corp abandoned one such plan in 2010, after failing to attract enough publishers to sign up. So-called “Netflix for magazines” aggregation services in the U.S. have met with mixed results. To a large extent, Blendle’s prospects will depend on convincing publishers and readers that its reading interface and suggestion engine is better than other ambitious services that have come before it.

Having said that, with the pressures on online advertising from declining rates and ad-blocking forcing more publishers to consider adopting paid-for models, “Blendle might have the timing right,” Crovitz, the former Journal publisher, said.

Can journalism be saved?

Klöpping said he's not worried about getting enough publishers on board. “The publishers don’t need to work with us,” he said. “It’s not that we bring in so much money — this weird, small company from Utrecht. The New York Times doesn’t have to work with us. They have to work with Facebook, they have to work with Google. They don’t need to work with us. That’s interesting.”

“I think they like the experiment,” he added. “They’re just curious if this can work.”

If Blendle cracks the U.S. market, it will look at launching in other territories, such as France and the U.K.. Based on the numbers they’ve seen so far in the Netherlands and Germany, Axel Springer believes the service will translate easily to other markets, including in English, Keese said.

“Our guess is that this works anywhere in the world,” he said.

In the long-run, Klöpping is torn about the prospects for serious journalism. On the one hand, the Internet gives journalists a better route to finding an audience from their work than they've ever had. On the other, too many publishers are pumping out low-grade content in search of traffic. Many will go out of business in the next few years, he said.

He’s determined to prove that there’s real value in the work that the best magazines and newspapers do, even in the digital age. “I think there’s still an incredible amount of journalism being done by these very, very famous institutions. I think there’s also a reason why a lot of the best journalism still comes from these institutions. And I think in the end, what’s the most important thing is that users start understanding that [this type of] journalism ... is worth money.”