The Dutch pay-per-article startup Blendle was greeted with some skepticism when it announced a year ago that ii would put all newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands behind an easy-to-use paywall designed to attract young readers willing to pay to read stories.

Today with more than 250,000 users mostly under 35, Blendle moves into its second year with new global licenses to sell The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Blendle has no subscriptions or ads. Instead readers pay for the articles they read and receive refunds for stories they dislike,

Blendle is coy about its micropayment revenue in this update post:  “We generate a very decent amount of money (I can’t say how much, unfortunately, only that it’s more than Apple generates for publishers) in our short existence.” 

In the post, the Dutch startup shared the following lessons learned in year one: 

1. Micropayments for journalism can work. But they don’t work for news because people are unwilling to pay for something they can get anywhere free. They will pay money for background and opinion pieces, analysis, and long interviews “In other words: people don’t want to spend money on the ‘what’, they want to spend money on the ‘why’.”

2. Blendle users punish clickbait by seeking refunds. “...we see this every day. Gossip magazines, for example, get much higher refund percentages than average (some up to 50% of purchases), as some of them are basically clickbait in print. People will only pay for content they find worth their money. So in Blendle, only quality journalism starts trending.”

3. Micropayment refunds create a metric for quality. Measurement typicall involve engagement and links clicked.  In the Netherlands, journalists have “the extra metrics of how much revenue did the stories generate in micropayments” and how many viewers sought refunds after reading the stories.

4. Revenue from micropayments is additional. Blendle says it does not attract current paying subscribers of publications but it does attract a new group that’s currently not paying to read those publications. Blendle now plans to work with publishers to integrate Blendle in their apps and websites.