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How Zette plans to let people access paywalled news with a single monthly subscr...

 1 year ago
source link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zette-plans-let-people-access-213150309.html
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How Zette plans to let people access paywalled news with a single monthly subscription

Paul Sawers
Sat, October 22, 2022, 6:31 AM·6 min read

A new startup wants to help online media outlets make money by making it easier for consumers to access paywalled content without being locked in to multiple subscriptions.

Demoing as part of the Battlefield 200 cohort at TC Disrupt this week, Zette is trying to achieve something that others before have tried. Since the dawn of time (well, at least since the advent of the web), digital media businesses have sought new ways to make money. While traditional newspapers and magazines' path to monetization was relatively straightforward, insofar as they charged money for a physical product (usually filled with paid advertising), the online sphere has had to flirt with a multitude of models, from advertising and events, to -- increasingly, it seems -- paywalls.

But while paywalls promise clear and predictable income, it's a difficult model to scale outside of the major outlets such as the New York Times. People don't want (or can't afford) dozens of subscriptions, but that doesn't mean that they're unwilling to pay something to access individual articles if they're given the option to do so.

There are already subscription-based services such as Apple News+, which bundles stories from hundreds of publications, and pay-per-article alternatives such as Blendle, which allow publications to charge microtransactions to read one-off articles. Zette sits somewhere in the middle, charging a monthly $9.99 subscription for access to 30 articles from its partner publications, though it is also dabbling with different pricing plans for those who want to purchase more credits. However, if the user doesn't consume their credits in a given month, this doesn't roll over to the next month -- everything resets.

The story so far

Zette was founded out of San Francisco in 2020 by former Forbes reporter Yehong Zhu, and after raising some $1.7 million in seed funding last year, the company is officially arriving in private beta this week for waitlist members, ahead of an anticipated public launch early next year. For now, Zette has inked deals with New Scientist, Forbes, McClatchy, Boone Newspapers, and Haaretz, with plans to bolster this by "hundreds" more in the coming year.


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