How Perch will make reading free
Reading is expensive. Books cost $20. A subscription to a newspaper or your favorite Substack author is $10 per month. Even scientific journals like Nature charge $200 per year. This is out of reach for most people, and it's a problem because reading is one of the best ways to get smarter and improve your life.
On a grander scale, reading is how we access the collective knowledge of humanity. The more accessible knowledge is, the faster society advances. A good example is the printing press and how it changed the course of history. But Gutenberg's invention only made reading cheaper. What if we made it free? That's the question we're asking with Perch, a new reading app for the Internet.
The mission of Perch is to make reading free, while paying writers like YouTubers. This post explains how we will do it, but in short, the plan is:
- Build the best reading app in the world for writing that's already free
- Introduce ads that are actually useful
- Share the majority of this ad revenue with writers and make it economically rational for them to make paywalled content free on Perch
Building the best reading app in the world
The best writing is moving to the Internet, but it's scattered across millions of websites. Readers are expected to visit each website and manually enter their email address to get updates when new content is published. But what if it worked more like podcasts?
You don't get an email every time there's a new podcast episode. That would be incredibly annoying. Instead, you open your favorite podcast app and all of your episodes are right there. Search is easier too. I wouldn't know where to start if I wanted to find the best blog or newsletter on parenting, but finding the #1 parenting podcast is easy. And while we're at it, there should be a recommendation engine that analyzes every article on the Internet and shows me exactly what I want to read, when I want to read it.
These are problems that hundreds of millions of people face every day with the proliferation of writing platforms like Substack, Medium, Ghost, Beehiiv, and Wordpress. And while lots of venture capital dollars have been raised by these companies to build better writing platforms, nobody is focused on the reader. That's why we're building Perch.
We believe that removing friction around cost, discovery, and usability in today's reading experience is how we get to billions of people reading every day. Simply put, humans will do more of something if it gets easier. Consider how much more music people listen to today because Spotify made it so easy compared to buying CDs or $0.99 songs on iTunes. Duolingo unlocking the latent demand for learning a language in more than 100 million people is another good example. Perch will create a similar explosion in reading.
We started by making all free writing on the Internet accessible from one app. Readers loved it because they didn't have to manage a bunch of browser tabs or a cluttered email inbox to read their favorite publications. And publishers benefit from better insights into their readership, which helps them improve their writing and secure better sponsorships. Newsletters, for example, can't even track open rates accurately, let alone the percentage of people who actually read their articles.
From there, we listened to our readers as we set out to build the best reading app in the world. When readers asked for the ability to listen to articles, we added it. When they asked for an easier way to organize and share their reading lists, we invented playlists. When they complained about newsletter overload, we built the Perch Daily Digest feature that saves them hours every week. And when they asked us to make it easier to discover more great writing, we built a machine-learning powered recommendation engine that leverages data like bookmarks, shares, and reading minutes to help readers find the perfect article.
Perch is already a 10x better way to access the massive catalog of free writing on the Internet. And soon it will offer free access to writing that currently sits behind paywalls or lives in books. To do that though, we'll need money.
Ads that are actually useful
We realize "useful ads" sounds like an oxymoron, but it's possible. Google, for example, built the most successful ad system in history while making ad quality a top priority. The did it by clearly delineating ads from organic search results and penalizing irrelevant or annoying ads with higher advertising costs. Of course, there's a balance between ad quality and profitability, and since the founders left, Google seems to have made profitability a larger priority. But for a while, Google demonstrated that ad quality and profitability can both be maintained at exceedingly high levels if the founders take a long-term view and commit to the principle that ads should be useful. Perch is committed to this principle and will take the same long-term view Google did in the early days.
To illustrate how ads on Perch will work, let's say a company like Intuit wanted to advertise their TurboTax product. They might do that by sponsoring a blog post titled "What is the Federal Income Tax Rate & How Does It Work?" and bidding for the search keyword "taxes." The better and more relevant the article is to what users are searching for, the less Intuit has to pay. One can imagine how a system like this acts as an incentive for advertisers to write valuable articles on topics that users are having a hard time finding information on. The higher the penalty for irrelevant or annoying adds, the higher the odds that ads on Perch are both relevant and useful.
Sharing revenue with writers
Similar to Spotify or YouTube, which pay creators for listens or views, we will pay out the majority of our revenue to writers for reads they get on Perch. Over time, as these payouts get larger and larger, it becomes economically rational for writers to make copyrighted or previously-paywalled content available on Perch to qualify for these payouts. YouTube is a good example of how effective this model can be. MrBeast doesn't charge $10 per month for access to his channel because YouTube pays him more than he could ever earn charging his viewers directly. Perch will create the same phenomenon for writing.
Perch is paving the way for a world where reading is completely free and writers are compensated fairly. If this interests you, consider joining our team as a Founding Designer or Founding Engineer.
