Online news stand eLinea is bankrupt. The startup, based in Delft, almost hit breakeven but suffered too much losses. eLinea offered access to offline magazines, through its online magazine. Earlier this year their competitor MyJour also had to shut its doors, which means Blendle and Maggy are basically the only startups left with the responsibility to save print media from extinction.
All you can read
eLinea was founded in 2013, before Blendle even existed. It featured access to a bunch of magazines through an all you can read model. Business was actually pretty good for the startup, says co-founder Marcel Suijkerbuik to website VillaMedia. New visitors converted to paying members more and more, losses decreased significantly. The startup neared the break-even-point, having over a thousand paying customers.
No marketing money
But when negotiations with a potential strategical partner came to a halt, there was no alternative businessmodel left for itsparent company, eReaders. “We’re still a couple of thousand euros short each month”, says Suijkerbuijk to VillaMedia. While they expected investors to line up to fund the business, eLinea instead failed to attract money for marketing.
Service continues
The bankruptcy makes the future of eLinea an uncertain one. Suijkerbuijk explains that for now the service will continue as usual, with new articles appearing regularly. The startup hopes for a restart, which means the platform would not lose its user base and paying customers. This is currently in the hands of the trustee in bankruptcy.
Another one bites the dust
With the recent demise of the similar online news reader MyJour, this basically leaves us with Utrecht based startup Blendle and Amsterdam based Maggy to disrupt the way people consume print media, online. eLinea did have a different business model than Blendle, yet the same as Maggy: all you can read. It graduated from the Netflix/Spotify school of selling content, by offering unlimited access for €9,99 a month. Blendle makes its users pay a small fee per article they read. It does offer significantly more titles and with funding from Axel Springer and The New York Times, their future seems a bit more bright.
