A start-up wants to do what few US publishers have succeeded in: make money from news.
The group of four entrepreneurs from NYU-Poly have created Presseract, a web app that allows users to subscribe to their favorite news sites on a single, shareable page.
And the product – which will be presented at the NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge – is unlike existing news-aggregating competitors. The aim is to work with publishers to earn more subscription dollars.
“It's like Netflix for subscriptions,” said Ali Al-Ebrahim, founder of Presseract.
With Presseract, users can subscribe to all their favorite free and paid content with one click. Noting that readers tend to read specific sections of a newspaper, the team plans to allow publishers to sell specific sections of the paper.
“We want to help publishers make money. Paywalls are risky and unproven, and mobile is a mess. Publishers sell their content on our platform in small subscriptions for users – it's easier than paywalls,” said Al-Ebrahim, adding that Presseract would earn a commission from the subscriptions made via the app.
Presseract, which the team has been working on for a year now, also allows interaction among their users so that they can follow one another, and share their “newspapers”. A beta version of the product can also be found at presseract.com.
“Imagine being able to read Barack Obama's newspaper,” quipped Al-Ebrahim, who is also the vice president of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Association at NYU-Poly.
“You can't read someone else's curated newspaper on Flipboard. It's a solitary experience.”
Certain news and magazine publications are now wary of news aggregators such as Flipboard, after seeing lumpy growth in advertising revenue from putting their content in the app. Other publishers have also worried that readers are getting their content via a third-party source, with little traffic directed to their websites, or no distinct increase in content-downloads.
Since July, Wired and The New Yorker – which are both published by Conde Nast – have stopped selling advertisements via Flipboard, and have stopped using Flipboard feeds. Users of Flipboard can still access the content, but will be directed to the magazines' websites instead.
“Flipboard and the others built their apps around displaying the content and pictures on the app itself. That's unsustainable unless publishers are getting paid,” said Al-Ebrahim.
The team members have spoken to more than 10 publishers, and “countless” journalism professors, all of whom want to see it before they believe it.
“We have a chicken and egg problem. I have learned to listen to their problems rather than sell my idea,” said Al-Ebrahim.
