On Tuesday, Chartbeat founder Tony Haile revealed more specifics about Scroll, a startup he launched quietly at the beginning of 2017, using a $3.1 million seed round he raised from a number of publishers, including The New York Times. Scroll will offer readers unlimited access to ad-free versions of sites belonging to brand-name news publishers.
Scroll is the third foray into news subscriptions that the Times has participated in this year, and it’s not alone. In May, the document-hosting startup Scribd, which also offers e-books to subscribers for $8.99 per month, announced it would add news to its offering; earlier in September, Medium announced it would add curated articles from publishers including the Times, The Economist and others to the paid tier it unveiled this past summer.
Here is a look at the state of bundled news subscriptions, in five charts.