Blink: A Pay-Per-Article News Service
Paving the way for seamless online micro-payments
Jun 2021 – Oct 2021
I often wanted to read a news article but hit the paywall, and subscribing to every other news website wasn’t worth the cost, especially if I visited them just once or twice a month. That’s when the idea of Blink came into my mind.
Blink enables people to read news articles behind paywalls by paying on a per-article basis.
Publishers embed Blink in their existing paywalls with just a few lines of code. When someone hits such a paywall, they get can read the concerned article for a small fee. They simply have to click the Blink purchase button to get immediate access to the full article. It’s that easy. Internally, we make a ledger entry of the transaction and bill the users cumulatively at the end of a month for all their purchases across all websites.
The over-arching idea of micropayments has a huge potential for revolutionizing many industries, such as enabling creators to monetize their content, lowering SAAS costs (pay-per-use), and opening up new monetization possibilities for game developers.
Things I learned:
- News business: Worked with 10 out of the top 15 newspaper & media houses on their subscription strategy
- Software engineering: Creating chrome extension, mobile app development