Will North Americans like Blendle, the iTunes for news?

NEWYORK— People pay to download music. They pay for TV episodes. Will they pay a few cents for news articles to escape ads and bypass subscription requirements?

The news service Blendle launched Wednesday in the U.S. with 20 news outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek. Readers pay nine cents to 49 cents (U.S.) to read a story (with a refund if they don’t like it).

For news outlets, it means a new source of revenue and a potentially younger audience. Readers can cut through the sludge of online content and get higher-quality stories from human editors and software formulas.

Although Blendle has more than100,000 paying, active users in the Netherlands and Germany, it could be a hard sell for Americans used to free stories online.

For one, there’s more online news available in English than in Dutch or German and a lot of it is free. And news outlets that block almost all stories from non-sub- scribers are more prevalent in Europe, said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, a journalism teaching organization.

In addition, Americans also haven’t warmed up to past micropayments efforts. Subscriptions with set monthly fees tend to be more popular than something that requires watching the tab.

In music, for instance, Americans are increasingly spending more on subscription services like Spotify while revenue slips from downloads of individual songs and albums.

Yet any payments, however small, are better than nothing.

“If a customer chooses to buy just one article a day from The Wall Street Journal, then I’m happy they’re choosing to do that,” said Katie Vanneck-Smith, the chief customer officer for Journal owner Dow Jones.

She says it’s not likely someone reading just an article a day would have subscribed anyway. But at the Journal’s price of 39 cents a story on Blendle, that’s $100 a year for the newspaper.