Yehong Zhu grew up surrounded by the news business.
Her mother, an immigrant from China, was a journalist. And as an undergraduate student at Harvard, Zhu covered national news at Forbes. She also wrote for the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Political Review and the Harvard Independent while studying philosophy, government and cybersecurity.
And she stayed in the editorial realm after graduating in 2018, when she moved to San Francisco for a product management job at Twitter where she worked on the platform's trending news section.
Now 26 years old, Zhu began to realize that the way news organizations generated revenue online wasn't keeping pace with changing consumer habits, particularly for millennials and Gen Zers. She said they have less brand loyalty than previous generations and consume the news via links that are scattered around the web and social media, rather than in a more centralized location like a print edition or the New York Times' homepage.
"There's a saying in journalism: 'offline dollars to digital dimes.' It was something I was seeing firsthand where even the articles that I would publish would be filled with ads and we would have to change our headlines to be more click-baity so that more eyeballs would see the ads so we could get more revenue," Zhu told me.
That didn't lead to a great user experience, either.
"I could see that the future of journalism was probably heading towards the subscription model where individual publications would paywall their content," Zhu said. "The other issue, though, is that if everybody paywalls their content, where does that leave the readers? We can't subscribe to 100 different outlets and websites."
It also makes it harder to share content.
What if there was something more akin to Netflix or Spotify or iTunes that would let people pay per article for trustworthy news across the internet in a way that was platform agnostic and still relatively affordable, she thought?
So in 2020, Zhu founded Zette (pronounced like "gazette"), a subscription news product that will launch later this year.
Zette will be a browser extension for Chrome at launch but the company will expand to other browsers, and by 2023, Zhu wants to release mobile apps for iOS and Android.
For $9.99 a month, users will be able to "unlock" up to 30 paywalled articles at news publications that have partnered with Zette. With that pricing model, each unlocked article is worth around 33-cents, and Zette negotiates its take rate with each content partner. It tips in the publication's favor when the deals aren't a straight 50/50 split, Zhu told me.
Zhu priced the subscription to match Apple News+, but that's where the similarities end, she told me. Zette will be platform agnostic and is building products for users across Mac, PCs, iOS and Android. It also doesn't lock users into its app, and sends readers directly to a publisher's site.
The company says it currently has licensing deals with over 80 publications, including Forbes, McClatchy, Boone Newspapers, New Scientist and Haaretz. Zhu's long-term vision is to have a mix of local, national and international news, as well as science, tech and cultural content.
At launch, the Chrome browser extension will be available in the U.S., and then eventually will expand into other English-speaking countries.
It currently has a growing waitlist close to 7,000 people, Zhu told me.
The company is based in San Francisco and has a distributed team of seven people. It has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding, and Zhu is aiming to raise $6 million in seed funding later this year.
Others have tried to launch similar products.
"Longtime media watchers like me might say that’s already been tried a bunch of times in the last two decades, and results have ranged from outright failure to very limited success," Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, wrote in an Aug. 2 story about Zette. "Your own mix-and-match journalism feast — appealing in theory but practical in execution? Zhu’s Zette should be one more relevant experiment to help settle the question."
Google has had a dedicated section for news since 2002.
Apple launched its flagship news app in 2015 with iOS 9 and added its premium subscription option, Apple News+, four years later.
In 2020, Ruport Murdoch's News Corp. announced it was building Knewz to give readers "the latest news from the widest variety of sources, free of filter bubbles and narrow-minded nonsense." It shut down about 18 months later, according to the WSJ.
Other attempts at monetizing news content include Blendle, a Dutch company, and Scroll, a New York startup that was acquired by Twitter in 2021.
