Readability implements subscription fee, pledges to pay content publishers

Arc90 is implementing a major change in its article de-cluttering service Readability: it is going to an at-least-$5 per month subscription model for continued use of the service. Of this $5 (or however much readers wish to kick in), 70% will be set aside to pay the content providers whose advertisements get stripped out of pages by using it, and 30% will go toward funding the continued maintenance and improvement of the service.

The bare-bones “read now” de-cluttering service will apparently continue to be free (and in fact, it has even seen some interface improvements over the previous version), but subscribers will be able to save the article to read at a later time (as with the Instapaper app) as well. It’s not clear what, if anything, this will mean for iOS RSS reader Reeder’s support for Readability page-scooping in its iPad and iPhone versions.

Arc90 is adding some new features to go with this new fee, including being able to share the top domains you read every month. And content publishers can embed a readability button directly into their own websites. (I wonder whether it might be a good idea to add this feature to TeleRead?)

And Arc90 is partnering with Instapaper, producing an Instapaper-powered Readability iOS app that subscribers can download and use on their iPhones or iPads. (I’m not entirely sure why anyone would want to use this instead of using the original Instapaper app, which does essentially the same thing, however—especially if we’ve already paid for Instapaper.)

From the point of view of seeing that web content gets paid for, I can see how this might be an experiment worth trying. It seems like it’s going to act like a literary, streamlined version of the micropayment service Flattr that works on a usage rather than tip-jar basis—it apparently keeps track of the sites where you use Readability and parcels out your subscription fee among those sites. It will be interesting to see if this proves helpful, or even noticeable, to sites such as Ars Technica whose execs have notably complained about people using ad-blocking or readability services.

When I first read this, I was ready to be upset over finding that a service I use every day was suddenly going to start charging. But it appears, on further investigation, that they will only be charging for additional reading convenience services while keeping the original de-clutter-it-now bookmarklet or Chrome extension free. Since that’s all I really need out of Readability, I can’t say that I have a problem with that. I’m not sure why I would want to pay a subscription fee for Readability when I can use Instapaper’s read-it-later function for free (barring the money I already paid for the Instapaper app), but that’s their problem.

And even if Readability should eliminate the free service in the future, Readability’s source code is freely available from Google’s source code repository—that’s how Apple was able to add it to Safari’s new Safari Reader feature—so there’s nothing stopping other people from creating their own free implementations of a website de-clutterer after the fashion of the original.