It is neither hyperbole nor needless negativity to say that reading online mostly sucks. Whether it’s the flashing, floating ads, the articles pointlessly split into five pages or the poorly-chosen fonts, one occasionally gets the feeling publications are deliberately trying to elicit a second Luddite uprising.
It’s no surprise, then, that a slew of tools exist for improving the reading experience on the web. Among the most well-known are Instapaper, that “Reader” button in Safari and, most recently, Evernote Clearly. What all of the services share is the ability strip out clutter like ads, change the font and generally turn the usual clusterflock of distractions of most websites into a clean, readable experience.
Naturally, for publishers, this represents a problem. Instapaper strips ads from online articles, shrinking the already microscopic number of people who actually click on them. Publishers could create their own Instapaper-like reading solutions, but those would similarly reduce the appeal of their site to advertisers and cut into revenue.
Online publishers are thus stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place: on the one hand, sites need ad revenue to survive; on the other, to develop a loyal, committed readership, they need to produce a pleasant reading experience that doesn’t interfere with an audience’s experience of a site’s content, something to which most online ads aren’t exactly conducive.
Beyond a particularly inspired design, however, the most obvious solution would be monetize the reading experience rather than the articles—a slight twist on the classic web model epitomized by Netflix that draws revenue from the convenience of the delivery mechanism rather than the content itself. And it’s that approach that’s favoured by Readability. The service, built off Instapaper’s technology, initially asked readers for a minimum of $5 a month to clean up their reading experience at the press of a button. In a novel twist, some of that money actually got passed on to publishers.
The service, though popular among some heavy web users, didn’t light the world on fire and the company didn’t make enough money to continue on the same path. Instead, Readability have now pivoted to build what they’re calling a reading platform. Publishers can sign up to integrate Readability’s technology into their site, meaning that they can include a little “Read Now” or “Read Later” button on their site that gives viewers a clutter-free page. What’s more, for now, they can do so for free.
Similarly, Readability have made their apps available for free, which lets you save articles and read them distraction-free on any number of devices. One imagines Readability’s aim is to turn their neat, clean reading experience into a new normal for the internet—and in the process, make it so that readers don’t mind paying a few dollars for the privilege of being able to clear up any web page they come across, without the attendant guilt of robbing the same site of its revenue. The long-term hope is to build a revenue model from a reading experience, and give publishers one more tool in their
impossible-seeming goal of building sustainable web publishing business modes.
It’s hopeful and a bit utopian, but at the very least, rather than models that push print answers onto internet questions, it’s a web-solution for a web problem. Whether it will work or become sustainable is naturally anyone’s guess. In the meantime, it presents a free-for-now way to get rid of all those damn ads.
Navneet Alang is the Toronto Standard’s Tech Critic
