Jeff Bezos gets a little punchy, suggests 'disemvoweling' the Washington Post

There r no bd ideas.

K, maybe this one.

Jeff Bezos is something of a legend in the tech world, having built e-commerce and web services giant Amazon into a behemoth.

When he bought the Washington Post in 2013, hope emerged that he might be able to apply his talents to save the newspaper and even journalism more broadly.

So far, he's done pretty well. The Post's web traffic has more than double from around 30.5 million monthly unique visitors to more than 73 million.

That doesn't mean that everything the spills forth from Bezos is of particular genius, a notion backed by a fun anecdote from this a deep and detail-filled feature by Fortune on Bezos and his work beyond Amazon.

Bezos has left the content side of the paper alone, but he has reportedly been keen to think up ways to engage readers and possibly even get them to pay more.

This led him to one of the more bizarre ideas to ever grace modern journalism: Disemvoweling.

The idea would be that a reader who did not like an article could pay to remove the vowels. 

Another reader could then pay to restore the vowels.

Lt that snk n fr a mnt.

“Working together with other smart people in front of a whiteboard, we can come up with a lot of very bad ideas," Bezos told Fortune.

Yes, disemvoweling is a crazy idea (and one that does not seem like the Post is about to try any time soon), but the core of the idea -- that users might be willing to pay small amounts of money for particular articles -- is something that remains among the all-too-short list of fringe ideas about how to pay for journalism in the digital era.

On Wednesday, Blendle launched in the U.S. The company bills itself as for journalism what Spotify and Netflix are for music and TV.

The company wants to create a system that gets users to pay just a few cents to read an article online. In return, you get high-quality journalism with no annoying ads. 

Blendle launched with some impressive partners including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek and the Financial Times. Articles cost between $0.09 and $0.49 depending on the source. 

The company started in the Netherlands and already claims to have around 650,000 users that pay for articles through its platform. 

Blendle doesn't offer disemvoweling -- yet -- but users can request refunds for stories they don't like.

Seems like Bezos thinks it might be worth a shot. The Post will soon have articles available on Blendle.

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