Spotify for journalism? This app wants to tackle the fragmented news market

The way we consume news in today’s generation has changed in a way we couldn’t possibly imagine. Lately, our consumption habits seem to revolve around our smartphones. Fewer and fewer people are subscribing to newspapers and instead are opting for RSS feeds, picking up news from Twitter, or flipping through apps like Cir.ca or Flipboard. However, there’s still a lot of quality content in newspapers that doesn’t make its way to the internet, content that a lot of people are missing out on.

The underlying reason people don’t read newspapers anymore is simple; there’s so much free media out there, so people don’t want to pay for it. Inkl, an Australian startup, believes it has a solution. Its answer comes in the form of a mobile platform that curates content from major news outlets and provides it all in one place. “Inkl makes high-quality journalism easy and affordable for readers to access” says Gautam Mishra, CEO of Inkl.

See: The News Lens, a Taiwanese media startup, wants to move the island away from gutter journalism​

Mishra, a former director of strategy at Fairfax Media, states that paywalls that companies like Fairfax have in place are only converting around two percent of readers into paying customers. “The question is, what to do with that 98 percent”. The site currently has seven publishers on board: The Guardian (UK, US and Australian editions), The Sydney Morning Herald, South China Morning Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and Indian business publication Livemint.It’s available to all countries outside the US. The startup plans to launch soon in America.

There are currently two ways of accessing Inkl, via a monthly subscription of AUD$15 (USD$12.40) per month or a pay as-you-go fee of 10 cents per article.

Inkl aims to address the fact that news is a form of media that has yet to adopt a global subscription solution, like with Netflix or Spotify. It’s something that may be hard to achieve as not only would it be a challenge to get people to pay for media in the first place, but also to sign up more news outlets and convince them of the value of this kind of bundled system.

We asked Inkl’s VP of marketing, Helen McMurdo, what they were doing to entice publishers, and she believes that they’ve got it figured out. “Because Inkl pays publishers every time a reader views one of their articles, publishers who partner with inkl are able to earn 50 to 100 times as much per page impression as most publishers earn for mobile advertising.”

However, Inkl isn’t the only company attempting to be the “Spotify for journalism.” Dutch startup Blendle, which is backed by the New York Times, allows users to purchase articles for prices that start from 10 euro cents for short stories and 80 euro cents for longer features.

“Blendle is a great business, and potentially more of a complement than a competitor. Because while Blendle focuses on print products and magazine-style content, we focus on providing the latest breaking news articles and investigations in an environment that is tailor-made for mobile devices.” says McMurdo.

Inkl is available to access via the website on any mobile device, with an iOS and Android app on the way.

This post Spotify for journalism? This app wants to tackle the fragmented news market appeared first on Tech in Asia.