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Paywalls coming to medium.com: “We're building monetisation”
- doctorshady 11y agoGoodbye Medium. Aaaaand, hello archive.is copy of Medium!
- akerro 11y agoIt was nice knowing you medium.
- jjoe 11y agoThe HN title is sensationalist considering the length of the article and other points of discussion. The full quote is: "I also think there's a lot of potential for premium or subscription or even user-paid content. Some sort of paywall or membership." It's unfair IMO.
- leereeves 11y agoIn context: "We're building monetisation into the product right now," says Williams, predicting a roll-out of the features within a month or so. "We're not limiting ourselves to advertising," he says, stressing that Medium won't become a mess of banner ads but instead "sponsored" content. "I also think there's a lot of potential for premium or subscription or even user-paid content. Some sort of paywall or membership." Sounds like sponsored content is the works right now, and paywalls are being considered.
- pmlnr 11y ago> title is sensationalist Yep, on purpose. The original title is misleading as well, presenting medium from a false view.
- dang 11y ago> Yep, on purpose That's an abuse of HN. We take submission privileges away from accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. The site guidelines ask you to change the original title when it is misleading or linkbait, but not by turning it into a sensational opinion piece. Cherry-picking a single detail at the expense of all the others is editorializing. Moreover your title went way beyond what that detail in the article justifies. All of this is what the HN guidelines try to prevent. I'm not sure I agree that the original title was misleading, but even if it was, the replacement must be accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article. If you have a tendentious point to make, you need to make it via a comment in the thread, on a level playing field with every other user.
- fgandiya 11y agoPlus, they discussed a whole lot of other things which were rather interesting.
- dang 11y agoCompletely unfair, so much so that I don't think restoring the original title and unflagging this thread is a good idea. Perhaps someone else can repost the article and start an un-skewed discussion about it.
- perlgeek 11y agoA paywall for user-generated content? Let's see how well that works. Doesn't quora do the same thing? How does it work for them?
- leereeves 11y agoDoes quora have a paywall? I've never bothered to go past the login wall. (I just Google what I want to read.)
- Piskvorrr 11y agoNot paywall, but IMNSHO dancing on the line of shady practices - "you're a spider? Carry on. You're a human? No text for you, register!"
- uptown 11y agoQuora has no paywall (or other revenue stream from what I can tell) but they did make some changes to require logins to access content. Not sure if that is still in-place.
- octo_t 11y agoNice to compare the comments here with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11222499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11222499 ("Show HN: Let's encourage ad blocking"). People don't want to pay for content, but they also don't want to see ads...
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- wrong_variable 11y agoMost people who are reading Medium or are on the internet are broke or in massive debt (cough Millennials). They can barely afford rent and food. If you want to monetize you need to either make medium for baby-boomers or change your govt.
- matthewcford 11y agoPeople prioritise different things, I see homeless people with smartphones. We live in an information age, and people value information.
- wrong_variable 11y agoDo you think homeless people are homeless with smartphone because they value a smartphone MORE then housing ? Or is it because the cost of a smartphone is 1/100 of a month's rent in a shitty apartment. Or to put it in another way - they can afford a smartphone but cannot afford housing.
- makomk 11y agoSmartphones are incredibly cheap these days compared to the price of content. They've gone on sale for as little as $10, and you can easily pay that for just one month's subscription to one website.
- mtbcoder 11y agoWhat people seem to not value are the channels that produce information. Information has become ubiquitous, ephemeral and most often freely available through any other arbitrary channel. For pay walls to work, it's an all-or-nothing system.
- wslh 11y agoHow can someone with previous startup experience can be so shortsighted! Ahhh, now I remember Twitter API restrictions and witch hunting of third party apps and this is coming from the same business culture.
- onion2k 11y agoIf this is set up as something like "5 free articles a month, then $0.1 to read the article, and 70% goes to the author" then I can see it working very well. Medium has proven that it's capable of attracting some talented writers and making the content discoverable - of all the content sites out there Medium feels like the only one I'd really consider subscribing to.
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- Disruptive_Dave 11y agoYes, but getting people - enough people - to pay for content is the challenge here, not having perceived quality content / discoverability.
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- brudgers 11y agoTitle: Inside Medium: an attempt to bring civility to the internet
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- nothis 11y agoI like the idea that ad-driven business are not sustainable. Ads are manipulative almost by definition and the world would probably be better without them (even though it's hard to make an argument for disallowing people to present their products in the best way possible). The problem with monetization I see is that internet usage is so far-spread. The amount of articles I read per week/month might be fairly constant but it's spread among dozens of sites. I don't want to pay for every single read (as that would make me think twice about reading stuff) so the only option is a subscription but then I'd pay $5 or $10 a month for a single site that, last month, I might have only read 3 articles on. IMO the only solution would be cross-site subscriptions, i.e. you pay for "online reading abo" and get access to like 50 sites. I'd also wish that they then get payed based on how much I read on each site. I'd actually pay for a service like that.
- pmlnr 11y agoThis is what https://flattr.com https://flattr.com was supposed to sort out, isn't it?
- SturgeonsLaw 11y agoYep, but nobody has managed to lower the friction with microtransactions enough to get the masses on board. If someone gets that right it could be a new paradigm for web publishing, but that's a big if.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoYep, but it's not exactly widely adopted. I think they have to have an arrangement with each site first don't they? I can onl remember seeing it on small blogs, not a publisher. Google's contributor might have had a better chance, but like a lot of G services it's completely unpromoted, and hard to find by search unless you know the name already.
- bowlich 11y agoIt would be interesting to see something like this built into the browser and then automated. Perhaps sites could send a header detailing where to send the micro-transaction. You could load up your browser with $X/month and then have the browser divide the money evenly between all the sites who it crossed passing that header. Now you don't have to think about it, and if it's built into say wordpress the content creator only needs to remember to punch their number into the system. I pay The Old Reader a $3.00 subscription for RSS each month. I find it a good fit. I would love to see an inverted RSS where I send a micro-transaction to everyone on my feed whose published in the month. Again, like RSS, it would be nice to just have the system be automated. No having to remember to look someone up on Patreon or Flattr and then manage how much I'm giving them.
- timwaagh 11y agoits sad. i like medium. but i do not pay for articles anymore. somebody's opinion is not worth money. 'free speech' should also mean 'free to access' in the internet age.
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- return0 11y agoabout time.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoI really wish people would look into patron funding (eg: Patreon) instead of paywalls.
- asymmetric 11y agoI fail to understand what medium adds to any other blogging platform. Especially us technical users have dozens of self-hosted alternatives (in addition to the weird beast that is GitHub pages) that have existed since, like, forever. Why lock yourself in a proprietary platform that then, invariably (like we are seeing now), is going to have to monetize your content? Why aren't more people bothered by the fact that more and more previously decentralized/self-hosted models are being transformed to monopolies?
- m52go 11y ago> We are going to take things down that are unsafe, that are hate speech, that are harassment. It's not a legal obligation, it's an obligation to the ecosystem of the site. Censorship, it seems.
- tehwebguy 11y agoThese comments kill me. You may have the right to say whatever you want, but not on a blog I'm hosting for you.
- leereeves 11y agoWhile that makes sense, when these companies aspire to be the dominant platform, an oligarchy, or even a monopoly if they could, their power over public discourse is concerning. Independent blogs and forums, and even independent media, are declining. The future is trending toward hosted content, with only a few hosts.
- soared 11y agoSo, no mods anywhere? You could make the same argument that deleting spam is censorship.
- leereeves 11y agoWe accept certain limits on free speech, even when the First Amendment applies. Encouraging a few powerful companies to censor anything they like, without restriction, because their platforms are private property is different from accepting reasonable censorship.
- laurent123456 11y agoI've never understood what's special about medium.com. It seems like any other blog, Wordpress, Blogger, etc. Plain text articles with some images. Or is there something more to it?
- zelcon5 11y agoIt uses a ton of Javascript and that tingles Javascript kiddies, which has sadly become synonymous with developers.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoContent. You didn't mention the content. Maybe it's the content.
- zelcon5 11y agoIf someone wants to charge me for reading their _blog_, forget about it. I'll read the next person's blog who understands that my reading of their post IS the payment.
- fgandiya 11y agoHonestly, I think the submission title doesn't do the article much justice. While it does mention their intention to monetize, it talks about other tings to. I mean, maybe I don't use it much, but it seems to do a really good job of filtering spam and I don't see much harassment. But it's hard to see opposing views unless you look hard enough for posts which are usually shut down by others. Also, the comments have to be approved by the author which does lead to echo chambers, but they seem to know this since their lawyer Ferrest said that "You shouldn't necessarily be kept safe from other people challenging your ideas." It's also very SF-centric at times, especially with all the self-help posts, but it does do a good job at content discovery since I can get a wide range of topic from the tech industry through to social issues. I don't know how they'll sell paywalls to users, though. I mean, the internet has a lot of blogs which are already free to see. Plus, I can use my Pocket recommended feature for diversity right?
- dang 11y agoYes, the title was an abuse of HN and irredeemably skewed the thread. Someone else is welcome to repost the article.
- hellofunk 11y agoWhile not true in this particular case, sometimes the title of an article on a linked page changes, making it appear as if the title submitted to HN was editorialized. This happened recently with a link I submitted that used the verbatim title, and I was called out for it when the site's owner changed the title later.
- fsiefken 11y agoPeople here are complaining about potential censorship and paywalls. Perhaps we can have the best of both worlds and decentralize it, compensate authors and still provide it free. Implement it as an Ethereum like dapp/smart contract with the same function as Patreon for long-form articles. Make the Dapp usable and accessible through the browser like Instapaper. Liberate the content, make it 'free' after stretch goals have been reached. Use community curation through voting contracts similar to the slashdot/hl karma points. Also integrate distributed search, automated tagging and perhaps integrated commenting and Sia or IPFS for distributed storage. And automatically create an epub versions of the top 12 longforms of the week so people can read their longform articles offline on e-paper/paper.