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Q: How am I going to make money on Medium? A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a payw

by WA 11y ago

Q: How am I going to make money on Medium? A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising. So what's the benefit of Medium over the website of my newspaper, where the newspaper has 100% control of the appearance, content, advertisers, additional revenue streams and so on? Furthermore: I don't read that many magazines or newspapers. But when I do, I make the conscious decision to read a specific magazine or newspaper, because they have a certain opinion on things I'd like to know about. Medium blends all of this in some uni-branded way and at the end of the day, people don't care about the publisher/brand anymore. The last time you bought something on eBay or Aamzon Marketplace, do you know the actual shop's name within the marketplace? Probably not. This is not desirable for publishers and thus, I don't believe that Medium will be the future. It's merely an experiment for publishers to play with, to get more traffic to their own websites (frequently you see the last paragraph stating "first appeared on wired.com" or whatever). Creating content on Medium is easier than doing your own website. So is getting readers. Once the platform is even more crowded, the readers won't come themselves. You need to actively market your content and then the question is: Why would you market Medium's platform instead of your own?

espadrine 11y ago
They (Medium) hope to change the granularity of publications from “subscribed to a newspaper” to “subscribed to a journalist” with a free (Patreon?) / ad / paywall choice for journalists. Of course, they have not really solved the issue of investigative journalism, the risk of which requires deeper pockets and the backing of a well-renowned organization such as Reuters, NYT, … to get you out of difficult situations. They do not have a solution implemented either. They have yet to meet the issues of ad blockers, aggressive or intrusive ads, privacy, or how to pick a premium price that matches the ad revenue that would otherwise be generated. While Evan Williams cited Facebook, he also dismissed search (and searchability), which is unwise. Facebook's largest issue is precisely that. People tend not to find content they are interested in, and they struggle to tweak their stream's algorithm to fix that. All in all, the newspapers they aim to disrupt have a head start of about five years, and what they consider their real competition are struggling on problems they have not faced yet.
privong 11y ago
I agree. > Medium blends all of this in some uni-branded way and at the end of the day, people don't care about the publisher/brand anymore. > Once the platform is even more crowded, the readers won't come themselves. You need to actively market your content and then the question is: Why would you market Medium's platform instead of your own? I have read a number of things on medium, but to be honest, I couldn't remember who wrote most of them. The homogeneous design, while visually appealing and easy to read, means I rarely remember whose blog I was reading on medium. The lack of identity in the design seems like it would impede branding and marketing. Which then means it's going to be tough to make money, even if they add in paywall, advertising, etc.
- mercer 11y ago
  I think Blendle is on the right path here, moreso than Medium. They offer a decent uni-branded layout (although I prefer Medium's), but allow tweaks based on the source. I think Apple's News app does the same thing. I can often recognize the source newspaper/magazine despite staying within Blendle's interface (similar to how one could recognize the New Yorker just from the typography). The one thing I'd like Blendle to add, but maybe they did so already, is the ability to follow journalists. A number of my friends, for example, are freelancers and publish in multiple publications.
cwyers 11y ago
> We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. So, Williams starts off at Blogger, which hasn't solved the problem of making money for content creators yet, really. To be fair to it, nor has Tumblr or Wordpress. Then he moves to Odeo, a pdocasting company, which fails to solve the monetization problem for podcast creators so hard that it pivots into enterprise video library SaaS solutions. Then he moves to Twitter, which isn't even trying to solve the problem of how to compensate content creators and is frankly not looking so good in terms of making enough money to pay itself. And now Williams is at Medium, where they haven't solved that problem QUITE YET. Quite yet. God help me, some days I feel like I'm just staring out into a world gone mad.
- drannex 11y ago
  I would like to say Tumblr does allow content creators to make money, I make a good 600-1200 extra a month off of tumblr due to sponsorship posts and advertisements on the actual blogs (google ads)
- smacktoward 11y ago
  All of those worked out how to make money for Evan Williams quite well, though, so there's that.
- ksk 11y ago
  Indeed. Money comes later as a business model has not been the most statistically successful model. ;)
- carterehsmith 11y ago
  But Medium has parallax scrolling and "social integration" features that will disrupt the news business, and perhaps all of our world later. Checkmate, dude?
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Let's examine info diet like we do real food. Imagine you work in a dense part of town that regularly features a number of food trucks that show up around lunchtime. You have your favorite styles and vendors, and know what to expect from them. Medium is like a set of unmarked vans where the cooks and cuisine change every day. Sometimes there will be something you don't normally get (I would kill for a decent Indian spot in this town) but other times you would rather have what you're comfortable with, and enough subpar experiences would make you wary of coming back. I used to read Medium, a lot. They had some interesting slice-of-life pieces I doubt I'd ever see at the New York Times or the Economist. But nowadays it seems like a lot of self-congratulatory startup humblebrag stories, and for most of them I'm starting to wonder if their prominence has less to do with the quality of their writing and more about their relationship with the Medium staff.
ericschmidt 11y ago
>The last time you bought something on eBay or Aamzon Marketplace, do you know the actual shop's name within the marketplace? Probably not. This is not desirable for publishers and thus, I don't believe that Medium will be the future. I agree. As Ev enters the b2b space, he is making some crucial mistakes RE: understanding the psychology of his customers. * Businesses don't want to be anonymous (and being on Medium, no matter what, increases their anonymity, simply because of the "uni-branding" that you mention) * People don't want to buy from anonymous businesses. People like identity. They like to identify with things. They like to personify things, to "humanize" them, to project themselves onto other objects and understand them that way. Medium has no identity. Medium's value is about its lack of identity. That's not necessarily a bad thing: Facebook's value is its lack of identity too. But Facebook and Medium have different customers, and their customers have different desires when it comes to managing their identities. Facebook's content-producers are primarily PEOPLE. Medium's content-producers are primarily ORGANIZATIONS. And while PEOPLE are fine being "uni-branded," ORGANIZATIONS fuckin despise it. Evan Williams doesn't understand the psychology of his customers. After reading this, I would not invest in Medium.
ThomPete 11y ago
I am always reminded of Clayton Christensens very simple principle. Be patient for growth not for profit. And it taps into a discussion I had with another friend of mine who is a founder of a venture backed company. His claim was that he wanted to create a workplace that wasn't like those old industries which exploited it's workers. My claim was that the only reason he could even care about that was because he was backed. The second you actually have to make a profit and there is no potential investor waiting to bail you out lets see how nice you are going to be. In other words. It's easy to want to change the world and do things different when you don't have to create profit but just grow. It's when you have to make a profit every single day the true nature of your business become apparent.

by WA 11y ago

espadrine 11y ago

They (Medium) hope to change the granularity of publications from “subscribed to a newspaper” to “subscribed to a journalist” with a free (Patreon?) / ad / paywall choice for journalists. Of course, they have not really solved the issue of investigative journalism, the risk of which requires deeper pockets and the backing of a well-renowned organization such as Reuters, NYT, … to get you out of difficult situations. They do not have a solution implemented either. They have yet to meet the issues of ad blockers, aggressive or intrusive ads, privacy, or how to pick a premium price that matches the ad revenue that would otherwise be generated. While Evan Williams cited Facebook, he also dismissed search (and searchability), which is unwise. Facebook's largest issue is precisely that. People tend not to find content they are interested in, and they struggle to tweak their stream's algorithm to fix that. All in all, the newspapers they aim to disrupt have a head start of about five years, and what they consider their real competition are struggling on problems they have not faced yet.

privong 11y ago

I agree. > Medium blends all of this in some uni-branded way and at the end of the day, people don't care about the publisher/brand anymore. > Once the platform is even more crowded, the readers won't come themselves. You need to actively market your content and then the question is: Why would you market Medium's platform instead of your own? I have read a number of things on medium, but to be honest, I couldn't remember who wrote most of them. The homogeneous design, while visually appealing and easy to read, means I rarely remember whose blog I was reading on medium. The lack of identity in the design seems like it would impede branding and marketing. Which then means it's going to be tough to make money, even if they add in paywall, advertising, etc.

mercer 11y ago
I think Blendle is on the right path here, moreso than Medium. They offer a decent uni-branded layout (although I prefer Medium's), but allow tweaks based on the source. I think Apple's News app does the same thing. I can often recognize the source newspaper/magazine despite staying within Blendle's interface (similar to how one could recognize the New Yorker just from the typography). The one thing I'd like Blendle to add, but maybe they did so already, is the ability to follow journalists. A number of my friends, for example, are freelancers and publish in multiple publications.

cwyers 11y ago

> We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. So, Williams starts off at Blogger, which hasn't solved the problem of making money for content creators yet, really. To be fair to it, nor has Tumblr or Wordpress. Then he moves to Odeo, a pdocasting company, which fails to solve the monetization problem for podcast creators so hard that it pivots into enterprise video library SaaS solutions. Then he moves to Twitter, which isn't even trying to solve the problem of how to compensate content creators and is frankly not looking so good in terms of making enough money to pay itself. And now Williams is at Medium, where they haven't solved that problem QUITE YET. Quite yet. God help me, some days I feel like I'm just staring out into a world gone mad.

drannex 11y ago
I would like to say Tumblr does allow content creators to make money, I make a good 600-1200 extra a month off of tumblr due to sponsorship posts and advertisements on the actual blogs (google ads)
smacktoward 11y ago
All of those worked out how to make money for Evan Williams quite well, though, so there's that.
ksk 11y ago
Indeed. Money comes later as a business model has not been the most statistically successful model. ;)
carterehsmith 11y ago
But Medium has parallax scrolling and "social integration" features that will disrupt the news business, and perhaps all of our world later. Checkmate, dude?

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

Let's examine info diet like we do real food. Imagine you work in a dense part of town that regularly features a number of food trucks that show up around lunchtime. You have your favorite styles and vendors, and know what to expect from them. Medium is like a set of unmarked vans where the cooks and cuisine change every day. Sometimes there will be something you don't normally get (I would kill for a decent Indian spot in this town) but other times you would rather have what you're comfortable with, and enough subpar experiences would make you wary of coming back. I used to read Medium, a lot. They had some interesting slice-of-life pieces I doubt I'd ever see at the New York Times or the Economist. But nowadays it seems like a lot of self-congratulatory startup humblebrag stories, and for most of them I'm starting to wonder if their prominence has less to do with the quality of their writing and more about their relationship with the Medium staff.

ericschmidt 11y ago

>The last time you bought something on eBay or Aamzon Marketplace, do you know the actual shop's name within the marketplace? Probably not. This is not desirable for publishers and thus, I don't believe that Medium will be the future. I agree. As Ev enters the b2b space, he is making some crucial mistakes RE: understanding the psychology of his customers. * Businesses don't want to be anonymous (and being on Medium, no matter what, increases their anonymity, simply because of the "uni-branding" that you mention) * People don't want to buy from anonymous businesses. People like identity. They like to identify with things. They like to personify things, to "humanize" them, to project themselves onto other objects and understand them that way. Medium has no identity. Medium's value is about its lack of identity. That's not necessarily a bad thing: Facebook's value is its lack of identity too. But Facebook and Medium have different customers, and their customers have different desires when it comes to managing their identities. Facebook's content-producers are primarily PEOPLE. Medium's content-producers are primarily ORGANIZATIONS. And while PEOPLE are fine being "uni-branded," ORGANIZATIONS fuckin despise it. Evan Williams doesn't understand the psychology of his customers. After reading this, I would not invest in Medium.

ThomPete 11y ago

I am always reminded of Clayton Christensens very simple principle. Be patient for growth not for profit. And it taps into a discussion I had with another friend of mine who is a founder of a venture backed company. His claim was that he wanted to create a workplace that wasn't like those old industries which exploited it's workers. My claim was that the only reason he could even care about that was because he was backed. The second you actually have to make a profit and there is no potential investor waiting to bail you out lets see how nice you are going to be. In other words. It's easy to want to change the world and do things different when you don't have to create profit but just grow. It's when you have to make a profit every single day the true nature of your business become apparent.