“It’s Readability’s money”  

Mike Davidson, whose recently acquired company Newsvine also has a mechanic for paying money to publishers, weighs in on this Readability discussion.

The anger about the financial side of Readability seems to come from the opinion that the company is “keeping publishers’ money” unless they sign up, but I guess I look at it differently: I don’t think it is the publishers’ money. I think it is Readability’s money. Readability invests the time and resources into developing their service and they are the ones who physically get users to pay a subscription fee.

Perhaps I’m reading the situation incorrectly, but I don’t think the fact that Readability was keeping money that was ‘owed’ was an issue for most publishers. I think it’s that it is the fact that they were using that fact as leverage to justify donations in a publisher’s name without prior consent that was the big mistake. Note that Davidson’s service gets up front permission from publishers.

I’ve never seen what Readability was doing as inherently evil or malicious. It’s completely obvious that they’re trying to do something interesting to alleviate publisher complaints about loss in revenue. But the fact is that with the move to a free service, they have undermined the very contribution system that they once touted as their main differentiating characteristic from competitors like Instapaper.

Readability’s new apps look great and they’re built with obvious taste. There are some usability problems, but nothing that can’t be fixed. The problem that Readability set out to tackle is incredibly difficult and worth exploring. But at some point, copying Instapaper feature for feature became more of a focus than making a unique and useful service.

That’s too bad because they’re on to something, they just started going about it in the wrong way, a way that feels less than genuine.