Longreads born on subway commute from Cobble Hill to Manhattan

Mark Armstrong’s virtual content creation tool, Longreads, is currently supporting three editors, a developer and a designer, through $3 per month or $30 per year subscription fees. They also get some advertising revenue. 

Armstrong first thought of the effort during long subway rides from his Cobble Hill home in Brooklyn to his midtown Manhattan job.

Subscribers get daily links, curated by the editors, of the best long-form stories published on the web. They still encourage the readers to suggest articles, by tweeting #longreads after links. The approach of services like Longreads and Instapaper appear to have influenced Google, which will now start showing you results for some queries that are separated out from other results, as “In-depth articles.” [Inside Search]

Since founding Longreads while living in Brooklyn, Armstrong has moved to San Francisco.

From Gigaom:

“The experience of reading online is getting easier—thanks to phones, tablets and “save for later”—and social recommendation is making it easier to find stories from both large and small publishers,” [Mark] Armstrong said. “The question now, of course, is who pays for them.” He says that the Longreads Membership is “also a way to pay writers and publishers for their work.” And we should expect to hear more about this in coming months.