The promise is a better experience for subscribers: no pre-rolls on video, no pop-up ads. Haile says his company has spent more than a year working out the funding formula and ability to serve such fast-loading content to a range of media companies, from traditional news outlets (the Philadelphia Inquirer), to digital giants (Business Insider) to niche sites (Slate, Talking Points Memo) to video-driven sites such as MSNBC or Fusion. Terms of the Gannett investment were not disclosed. Scroll investors include The New York Times, News Corp and Axel Springer. The service will cost $5 month, with proceeds divided among contributors based on metrics such as attention time and loyalty to particular sites, says Haile, a founder of the premium analytics firm Chartbeat.
Unlike Facebook’s Instant Articles, MSN.com or Google’s AMP, the stories will be from each site. Subscription services and micro-payments have tried and failed before, but news executives taking part in this experiment say several factors, such as the shift from advertising to subscription revenue, make Scroll a better bet.
Scroll will be launched in the second half of the year, enabling readers to sample sites roughly as Spotify does for music, said Scroll CEO Tony Haile. The company also announced it has signed up outlets such as MSNBC, the Atlantic, Slate and Fusion Media Group for the service, in which readers pay monthly for a faster-loading, cleaner, ads-free news experience. An idea to capture casual news subscribers got a major push today, with Gannett becoming an investor in the consumer subscription service Scroll.
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