WASHINGTON—The Dutch media platform Blendle, which allows users to pay a small fee to read an article in digital format, launched in the United States this past Wednesday. The platform is aimed at revolutionizing the consumption of online news. 

"We thought it was quite strange that music had Spotify and video had Netflix, but journalism didn't have its own platform where people could pay for it," said co-founder Alexander Klopping.

Instead of paying a monthly subscription fee, Blendle allows users to pay a few cents to read an article - with no advertisements - from among a wide variety of big U.S. publishers on its site.

U.S. media has been studying micropayment of this kind for digital consumption for some time, but so far they have not developed a common strategy for determining the best way to make the concept profitable on the Net.

The price for reading a newspaper article ranges from 19 cents to 39 cents, while magazine pieces cost between 9 cents and 49 cents.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek and The Economist are just some of the major firms whose reporting can be read through Blendle.