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Medium plans to launch a consumer subscription product this quarter

67 points by chmars 10y ago

StudyAnimal 10y ago
I don’t think I will pledge until I see drastic improvements in two areas: Content (still lots of posts pushing a very orthodox agenda, lots of self-help fluff and too much start-up techy stuff. Not enough challenging or interesting general reads), and the Reading Experience: I can’t believe I have to export to Pocket (which is currently doing a better job providing me good content that Medium is) in order to get things like white on black or sepia themes, a choice of fonts with ligatures and full justification. Auto-scrolling would be nice too.
- blacktulip 10y ago
  This and, like in the original post, I have to scroll down a full page to start reading the real content. update: the original post has been changed... it was a medium post with a full screen cover image.
deleted 10y ago
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chebum 10y ago
It's unclear whom will they charge: writers or readers?
- tristanj 10y ago
  From the TC article (the new link), looks like they're charging readers.
alvil 10y ago
Wow? :D Never mind.
akoster 10y ago
The ability for a "light" HTML only mode would be greatly appreciated
- ptrptr 10y ago
  Removing “highlights from other users” would be appreciated, IMO they are distracting and pointless.
  - ezekg 10y ago
    Especially when readers go and highlight random spaces…
cyborgx7 10y ago
This post is telling me to take a pledge to subscribe without telling me what I'm suppposed to be getting. How about we clarify that first and then I decide if this glorified blogging platform is worth it. And to the point made in the article about digital products being undervalued in relation to physical ones, maybe people don't feel like all these digital products provide that much value to them.
therealmarv 10y ago
Great news... for the 50 people who got fired recently
Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
FWIW, this posting doesn't appear to be an official Medium announcement, just something written (badly) on their platform by a third-party. mods: maybe change the URL to https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/ ? (edit: thank you mods)
te_chris 10y ago
Why would I subscribe to Medium in the hope that it becomes some sort of real organisation, with good writing, when those already exist? Sorry, but I think I'll just keep paying for The Guardian, The LRB, N+1, MIT Technology Review etc and patronising my local bookshops. I'm not poopooing the idea of Medium going subscription, FWIW, but this author's call to arms is a bit ridiculous.
- lmm 10y ago
  > Why would I subscribe to Medium in the hope that it becomes some sort of real organisation, with good writing, when those already exist? Sorry, but I think I'll just keep paying for The Guardian, The LRB, N+1, MIT Technology Review etc and patronising my local bookshops. I think I read more and better content on medium than all of those put together. (Of course there's also a huge amount of dreck on there)
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    Any examples? I can only think of one super interesting article I've ever read on Medium whereas I'll get that at least once a week from a decent news source. Medium, in my experience, is half echo-chamber half opinion from people who have little to no idea what they're talking about.
    - lmm 10y ago
      Nothing specific springs to mind (but that's true for all those sources). Most good articles there I pick up from here or reddit or the like - the only part of medium I "follow" is War is Boring and they're pretty variable. The discovery experience on medium is pretty terrible and the front page often looks like the kind of echo chamber you're talking about.
      - criddell 10y ago
        I'm like you - I end up on Medium because of shared link. If Medium were to go away, I suspect those links would just lead to a different site. What value does Medium add?
hochchristoph 10y ago
Wow. That's the typical Medium post in a nutshell.
jarofgreen 10y ago
> We are at a crossroads of consumer attention when it comes to reading, writing, and the “blogosphere”. With the seemingly endless amount of standalone blogs out there on the web, the market is thirsting for a platform that will consolidate blogging, and bring the value it provides into one convenient and curated location. ... YouTube did this exact thing for filmmakers, comedians, musicians and more. Instagram did this exact thing for photographers and models. Let’s do what we can do to make sure this happens on Medium! So we are saying that centralising on one platform is the only way forwards? That may be right, but I feel like that's a point that could do with a hell of a lot more consideration ...
- pimterry 10y ago
  > So we are saying that centralising on one platform is the only way forwards? Peter Gasston has a great talk on this that's well worth watching: https://vimeo.com/181110920 https://vimeo.com/181110920. The short answer is: right now, yes, that's becoming a fairly dominant strategy across the board, but the future isn't necessarily as bad as it looks.
  - StevePerkins 10y ago
    ... hosted on Vimeo instead of YouTube, heh.
  - jarofgreen 10y ago
    Was an interesting talk, thanks!
- deleted 10y ago
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- ohstopitu 10y ago
  and why Medium? No seriously, what's the value proposition? Youtube at the time had an awesome "free" service when most others were littered with ads and had terrible video players. Instagram had an awesome mobile service that was hip and clicked with it's users. Medium is at best a crappy bloggr that was once pretty awesome but now that it has a lot more users (and worse a lot more writers), the quality of content has dropped significantly. I've read articles about from people who are basically using Medium to do content marketing and worse yet, do dumb challenges like 1+ article / day challenge - case and point: https://medium.com/@larrykim https://medium.com/@larrykim Medium is quickly turning into hipster 9gag or buzzfeed. I'm definitely not saying we don't need a Youtube for written content, but imo, Medium is not yet it.
philjackson 10y ago
"We live in a world where digital products are inherently undervalued relative to other products. We will shell out $5 for a pumpkin spice latte in a heartbeat, but the second we have to pay $1.99 for an app, we begin to conduct cost-benefit analysis as if we were buying a damn house." This is something I think about a lot, especially as a developer of a service that will one day require subscription (Yipgo). When I buy a coffee, I walk into a physical building, staffed by people who I've got a two way relationship with and I get a physical coffee. As well as the experience itself, there's more a more tangable product in the coffee than there is a blog I might subscribe to. I'm not saying we shouldn't pay for it, I'm just suggesting that might be the phsycology that explains it a little.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  Well, the coffee has a marginal cost that is non-trivial. Downloading an app has essentially zero marginal cost.
  - riprowan 10y ago
    The coffee also has, at best case, a one-use max.
    - criddell 10y ago
      That's a benefit. If I buy a coffee I know what I'm getting. If I download a $2 app I might get lucky and use it right away in which case it might be a great value. Or it might require 30 minutes of setup and experimentation in which case it has already cost me more than the coffee.
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    How many consumers consider marginal cost when making a purchase though?
    - duncanawoods 10y ago
      I expect it factors into intuitive value judgements even if not totally conscious. Its like the lock-smith who slaves for an hour using a dozen tools vs. one who takes 30s and no tools. The latter is more skilled and served you better but will not feel as valuable. The artificial scarcity of an app and the work of "not preventing you downloading something" just doesn't ring our value bell.
idiot_stick 10y ago
>If Medium can get enough of its readers to subscribe to a paid product with extra features, it may be able to achieve its initial goal of building a different business model for publishers. A subscription model is different?
idiot_stick 10y ago
>If Medium can get enough of its readers to subscribe to a paid product with extra features, it may be able to achieve its initial goal of building a different business model for publishers. A subscription model is different?
blobman 10y ago
I like Medium and I DO hope it goes ahead with the subscription model. It will make it easier for me to stop procrastinating and to read something more useful, like arxiv articles.
holydude 10y ago
too tldr for me I can see myself subscribing if the content is good and authors get paid for views (a la spotify model ?)
Pandabob 10y ago
I really like hackernoon and could see myself paying for more content like that. If they could convince some more high(er) profile tech/startup bloggers to use their platform, like Ben Thompson from exponent or Benedict Evans from A16Z, i'd definitely at least try it.
shubhamjain 10y ago
Personally, I would find it hard to shell out money for a Medium subscription, simply because I'd detest paying for a subscription and still myself short of quality stuff by New Yorker. Imagine the same scenario in music streaming — paying for Spotify and still unable to access most of songs you'd like. Frankly, it seems advertising is more obvious option for Medium rather than building a subscription business. Surely, it's despised, but one must wonder what chances Facebook would have had if it thought of creating a "$1 / month" social network.
bshimmin 10y ago
This has now been unlinked from the original submission (https://medium.com/the-mission/wow-its-official-the-subscription-model-is-coming-to-medium-134bc0846f6e#.57orkwlct https://medium.com/the-mission/wow-its-official-the-subscrip...), which contained this gem: Personally, I couldn’t count how many Medium articles have changed my life, but a conservative estimate would be hovering around 50. I think perhaps the disconnect between this extraordinary statement [1] and the reality of people who might actually pay to read things on Medium is perhaps indicative of why this might not be the great success they're hoping it will be. [1] I have read plenty of articles on Medium and I'm not sure even a dozen of them have had me thinking about them five minutes later, never mind "changed my life".
- deleted 10y ago
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helen842000 10y ago
It seems a lose-lose situation to get readers to pay to consume content. The most valuable part of Medium is that it has a large audience that writers want to reach. Surely a better monetization strategy would be to allow promoted posts so that even the individual creator can pay to reach more readers.
tvanantwerp 10y ago
One of the biggest turn-offs when I'm thinking about clicking a link to an article is seeing that it's at Medium. So many things there are of such low quality that I can't imagine wanting to pay for it. If anything, I would pay whomever could find a way to forever remove half-baked think pieces and Silicon Valley posturing from my life.
- laurentdc 10y ago
  I think that has to do with writers, not with Medium itself as a platform
  - iamdave 10y ago
    You're not wrong, but you also can't help the perception people have if this is in fact a large enough perception; and IMO I've at moments held this perception myself. I know it isn't Medium's fault, but it's something the medium of Medium.com enables with the "anyone can publish" approach. That's not necessarily a bad thing on its face, but it is something that exists.
  - CM30 10y ago
    Perhaps, though I hear that part of the reason those stereotypical Medium 'inspiration' pieces are so common is because they're the easiest type of content to make popular on the service. In some sense, the issue is that Medium seems to be rewarding this content at the expense of deeper, more interesting stories.
api 10y ago
Will they pay their writers or is this a magazine staffed by crowdsourced unpaid interns?
- deleted 10y ago
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- lancewiggs 10y ago
  That's the issue. They are breaking the standard contract between the reader and writer: - We readers only pay if the writer is paid. - We writers only write for free if the reader does not have to pay.
iamdave 10y ago
A lot of attention is being put in this piece as to how this will affect the reader - which okay, this is ostensibly a service built for readers and I get that. I'm genuinely and truly hoping though Medium plans to address how this will impact writers on the platform. Not only do I have my own publication on Medium, I contribute to a column ran by a major name in sports journalism. How is this subscription service going to benefit writers? Will it at all? I don't know if I can keep my publication on a site that's charging my readers while I continue to write for free-though I understand Ev and Co.'s want to monetize the platform. When there's a element of everyone contributing content for the same reward (eyeballs and shares), suddenly bringing money into this has me as a writer wondering "Okay, I provide value to your platform by driving visitors to the site, but now you're telling me you plan to charge my readers? That's cool, but what's in it for me?"
- criddell 10y ago
  > That's cool, but what's in it for me? That's probably the last question they want writers asking because it's a very hard one for them to answer. So why are you publishing on Medium? You could pay for hosting and keep total control of what you publish and how it's presented. Instead, you give control to Medium and what do you get in return? You avoid paying $10 every month to a hosting provider I guess, but is that what your work is worth?
  - iamdave 10y ago
    >You avoid paying $10 every month to a hosting provider I guess, but is that what your work is worth? Great question, I've been asked that before and here's the closest thing I can get to what I think is a fair answer: The work? No. It may be worth less, it may be worth more to others, to me it's definitely worth more. But My time, on the other hand? By publishing on Medium I'm saving a lot of time I otherwise wouldn't get back from self-hosting. Let me unpack that a bit, maybe you can provide some insight because I'd like to hear some perspectives on this I hadn't previously considered. Keep in mind, I'm a SysAdmin during the day for a company that hosts many client sites so this is a lot of stuff I do 9-5, so I really don't want to do it after 5 if I can get out of it. Self-hosting for me means the following: * Spinning up a DO droplet (or Linode or whatever cloud provider you pick) and all of the ancillaries like domain, email etc * Installing and configuring the platform (I went from WordPress to Ghost, back to WordPress) * Making sure my installation is secure, making sure my host node is secure * Promoting posts, keeping SEO and discoverability up-to-date, keeping my shareable URLs in check, etc. That's a lot of work to put into self-hosting-and granted a lot of this stuff is "set it and forget it"-but when my last blog got hacked twice in a row despite checking off all the best practices for WP security-I wanted to go somewhere that allowed me to do three things and do them quickly: (1) Start a site (2) Publish posts (3) Promote them as effortlessly as possible. Medium fit the bill brilliantly. I love their editor, I like the discoverability of other writers through the community, and it's a one-stop-shop between my site and the sports site I write for. Big wall of text, hope that answers your question, but I'm curious what you think of this take, if you're willing? postscript: I have recently discovered and managed to get a site up and running via Jekyll+Github pages and there's a very good chance it will become my main platform, I'm still testing out a few aspects but I'm liking what I see so far.
jpeg_hero 10y ago
> Founded in 2011, Medium has raised $132 million, and now it looks like there’s a plan to start making good on those investments. Oh, the snark. Yeah, you don't pay back $132m getting people to pay for bog standard blog posts.
- openmosix 10y ago
  I think Medium raised the $132M with the promise of "we will disrupt how news are produced and consumed". A monthly subscription of a digital magazine does not seem a so disruptive concept. The only disruption is to have people to write article for free while you charge for its reading.
kristianc 10y ago
I'm struggling to work out what Medium is going to offer in an 'upgraded' reading experience that is going to make it worth paying for. The problem that they face is that the core asset they own - other people's content - just isn't that compelling. There are a couple of reasons for this, but here are a couple: - People go to Medium to find an audience for their work. Medium has no meaningful brand / identity / curation / editorial voice of its own, so Medium posts tend to be posts that people have thrown up their, tagged, and hoped to find an audience. - There's very little way of an author or a writer building their brand through Medium. This is because all of the articles are presented in exactly the same way with the exact same layout features. Even if I remember an article, I'm going to struggle to remember who wrote it. - Although Medium launched with the promise of helping to launch undiscovered writers and rewarding attention minutes, in practice this has actually ended up being 'he or she who has the most Twitter followers wins'. This means that the same folks who win on Twitter, and Medium simply ends up being another outlet for their voice. - People who are prepared to wade through all of the above on the off chance that they'll strike it lucky and their article will end up with a few thousand shares have worked out how to game Medium. This has filled Medium with the kind of low grade motivational bullshit no one in their right mind would pay for. - It's really hard to believe any pitch that starts with 'I know we've ploughed through $132m in venture money so far, but it'll all get better when we ask people to pay for it.' Either Medium has some very heavyweight content partners lined up - in which case, the rank and file creators are just SEO fodder - or Medium is doomed.
- sAbakumoff 10y ago
  >This is because all of the articles are presented in exactly the same way with the exact same layout features. But what about communities like Hacker Noon? If I publish a medium article in such a community, at least the header differs from the regular medium's one > People who are prepared to wade through all of the above on the off chance that they'll strike it lucky and their article will end up with a few thousand shares have worked out how to game Medium From my personal observations, sharing a link to an interesting medium article in Reddit and HN can generate quite a traffic. I've got 13.5K reads for one of my stories by using this way, that's hardly any kind of "game" can be found there.
- 10y ago
dangerboysteve 10y ago
My issue with Medium is low barrier to entry for most authors. Whenever I see a HN post which links to Medium I never click on it. I have read many Medium post which ended up being self promotional pieces with little or no substance or flat out click-bait.
vermontdevil 10y ago
How is the Svbtle model working out? The one where they charge content creators $ to host on their site but readers get to read the content for free. Maybe Medium should have gone this way instead. I find it difficult that there's a working model in which subscription from the readers is going to be sufficient enough to survive, much less grow. Of course certain site s are capable of doing this (NYT, Economist, etc). Medium? I dunno.
gumby 10y ago
How often does a channel become a brand name? Netflix became a household name in the DVD era because they had a unique and useful value prop. Ditto Facebook (well, not unique at time of creation but they managed it very well). But nobody says they want to sit down to watch an NBC show or some RCA music. Even when you manage the content creation the name brand is hard to maintain Yes, Disney and many of its sub brands, and a very small number of news sources like NYT, but they are the exception. In fact the channel model tends not only to be a painful business (has to be made up in volume) but chews up the branding further downstream (car companies worry about being genericized by self-driving fleet managers). Medium has chosen a tough row to how.
- gumby 10y ago
  > Medium has chosen a tough row to how. Goddamn you iOS autocorrect, "hoe" is a perfectly reasonable word!
castle-bravo 10y ago
Does this mean that it'll be harder to accidentally end up on Medium? If so, great.

67 points by chmars 10y ago

I don’t think I will pledge until I see drastic improvements in two areas: Content (still lots of posts pushing a very orthodox agenda, lots of self-help fluff and too much start-up techy stuff. Not enough challenging or interesting general reads), and the Reading Experience: I can’t believe I have to export to Pocket (which is currently doing a better job providing me good content that Medium is) in order to get things like white on black or sepia themes, a choice of fonts with ligatures and full justification. Auto-scrolling would be nice too.

blacktulip 10y ago
This and, like in the original post, I have to scroll down a full page to start reading the real content. update: the original post has been changed... it was a medium post with a full screen cover image.

deleted 10y ago

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chebum 10y ago

It's unclear whom will they charge: writers or readers?

tristanj 10y ago
From the TC article (the new link), looks like they're charging readers.

alvil 10y ago

Wow? :D Never mind.

akoster 10y ago

The ability for a "light" HTML only mode would be greatly appreciated

ptrptr 10y ago
Removing “highlights from other users” would be appreciated, IMO they are distracting and pointless.
- ezekg 10y ago
  Especially when readers go and highlight random spaces…

cyborgx7 10y ago

This post is telling me to take a pledge to subscribe without telling me what I'm suppposed to be getting. How about we clarify that first and then I decide if this glorified blogging platform is worth it. And to the point made in the article about digital products being undervalued in relation to physical ones, maybe people don't feel like all these digital products provide that much value to them.

therealmarv 10y ago

Great news... for the 50 people who got fired recently

Doctor_Fegg 10y ago

FWIW, this posting doesn't appear to be an official Medium announcement, just something written (badly) on their platform by a third-party. mods: maybe change the URL to https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/ ? (edit: thank you mods)

te_chris 10y ago

Why would I subscribe to Medium in the hope that it becomes some sort of real organisation, with good writing, when those already exist? Sorry, but I think I'll just keep paying for The Guardian, The LRB, N+1, MIT Technology Review etc and patronising my local bookshops. I'm not poopooing the idea of Medium going subscription, FWIW, but this author's call to arms is a bit ridiculous.

lmm 10y ago
> Why would I subscribe to Medium in the hope that it becomes some sort of real organisation, with good writing, when those already exist? Sorry, but I think I'll just keep paying for The Guardian, The LRB, N+1, MIT Technology Review etc and patronising my local bookshops. I think I read more and better content on medium than all of those put together. (Of course there's also a huge amount of dreck on there)
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  Any examples? I can only think of one super interesting article I've ever read on Medium whereas I'll get that at least once a week from a decent news source. Medium, in my experience, is half echo-chamber half opinion from people who have little to no idea what they're talking about.
  - lmm 10y ago
    Nothing specific springs to mind (but that's true for all those sources). Most good articles there I pick up from here or reddit or the like - the only part of medium I "follow" is War is Boring and they're pretty variable. The discovery experience on medium is pretty terrible and the front page often looks like the kind of echo chamber you're talking about.
    - criddell 10y ago
      I'm like you - I end up on Medium because of shared link. If Medium were to go away, I suspect those links would just lead to a different site. What value does Medium add?

hochchristoph 10y ago

Wow. That's the typical Medium post in a nutshell.

jarofgreen 10y ago

> We are at a crossroads of consumer attention when it comes to reading, writing, and the “blogosphere”. With the seemingly endless amount of standalone blogs out there on the web, the market is thirsting for a platform that will consolidate blogging, and bring the value it provides into one convenient and curated location. ... YouTube did this exact thing for filmmakers, comedians, musicians and more. Instagram did this exact thing for photographers and models. Let’s do what we can do to make sure this happens on Medium! So we are saying that centralising on one platform is the only way forwards? That may be right, but I feel like that's a point that could do with a hell of a lot more consideration ...

pimterry 10y ago
> So we are saying that centralising on one platform is the only way forwards? Peter Gasston has a great talk on this that's well worth watching: https://vimeo.com/181110920 https://vimeo.com/181110920. The short answer is: right now, yes, that's becoming a fairly dominant strategy across the board, but the future isn't necessarily as bad as it looks.
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  ... hosted on Vimeo instead of YouTube, heh.
- jarofgreen 10y ago
  Was an interesting talk, thanks!
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ohstopitu 10y ago
and why Medium? No seriously, what's the value proposition? Youtube at the time had an awesome "free" service when most others were littered with ads and had terrible video players. Instagram had an awesome mobile service that was hip and clicked with it's users. Medium is at best a crappy bloggr that was once pretty awesome but now that it has a lot more users (and worse a lot more writers), the quality of content has dropped significantly. I've read articles about from people who are basically using Medium to do content marketing and worse yet, do dumb challenges like 1+ article / day challenge - case and point: https://medium.com/@larrykim https://medium.com/@larrykim Medium is quickly turning into hipster 9gag or buzzfeed. I'm definitely not saying we don't need a Youtube for written content, but imo, Medium is not yet it.

philjackson 10y ago

"We live in a world where digital products are inherently undervalued relative to other products. We will shell out $5 for a pumpkin spice latte in a heartbeat, but the second we have to pay $1.99 for an app, we begin to conduct cost-benefit analysis as if we were buying a damn house." This is something I think about a lot, especially as a developer of a service that will one day require subscription (Yipgo). When I buy a coffee, I walk into a physical building, staffed by people who I've got a two way relationship with and I get a physical coffee. As well as the experience itself, there's more a more tangable product in the coffee than there is a blog I might subscribe to. I'm not saying we shouldn't pay for it, I'm just suggesting that might be the phsycology that explains it a little.

chimeracoder 10y ago
Well, the coffee has a marginal cost that is non-trivial. Downloading an app has essentially zero marginal cost.
- riprowan 10y ago
  The coffee also has, at best case, a one-use max.
  - criddell 10y ago
    That's a benefit. If I buy a coffee I know what I'm getting. If I download a $2 app I might get lucky and use it right away in which case it might be a great value. Or it might require 30 minutes of setup and experimentation in which case it has already cost me more than the coffee.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  How many consumers consider marginal cost when making a purchase though?
  - duncanawoods 10y ago
    I expect it factors into intuitive value judgements even if not totally conscious. Its like the lock-smith who slaves for an hour using a dozen tools vs. one who takes 30s and no tools. The latter is more skilled and served you better but will not feel as valuable. The artificial scarcity of an app and the work of "not preventing you downloading something" just doesn't ring our value bell.

idiot_stick 10y ago

>If Medium can get enough of its readers to subscribe to a paid product with extra features, it may be able to achieve its initial goal of building a different business model for publishers. A subscription model is different?

idiot_stick 10y ago

blobman 10y ago

I like Medium and I DO hope it goes ahead with the subscription model. It will make it easier for me to stop procrastinating and to read something more useful, like arxiv articles.

holydude 10y ago

too tldr for me I can see myself subscribing if the content is good and authors get paid for views (a la spotify model ?)

Pandabob 10y ago

I really like hackernoon and could see myself paying for more content like that. If they could convince some more high(er) profile tech/startup bloggers to use their platform, like Ben Thompson from exponent or Benedict Evans from A16Z, i'd definitely at least try it.

shubhamjain 10y ago

Personally, I would find it hard to shell out money for a Medium subscription, simply because I'd detest paying for a subscription and still myself short of quality stuff by New Yorker. Imagine the same scenario in music streaming — paying for Spotify and still unable to access most of songs you'd like. Frankly, it seems advertising is more obvious option for Medium rather than building a subscription business. Surely, it's despised, but one must wonder what chances Facebook would have had if it thought of creating a "$1 / month" social network.

bshimmin 10y ago

This has now been unlinked from the original submission (https://medium.com/the-mission/wow-its-official-the-subscription-model-is-coming-to-medium-134bc0846f6e#.57orkwlct https://medium.com/the-mission/wow-its-official-the-subscrip...), which contained this gem: Personally, I couldn’t count how many Medium articles have changed my life, but a conservative estimate would be hovering around 50. I think perhaps the disconnect between this extraordinary statement [1] and the reality of people who might actually pay to read things on Medium is perhaps indicative of why this might not be the great success they're hoping it will be. [1] I have read plenty of articles on Medium and I'm not sure even a dozen of them have had me thinking about them five minutes later, never mind "changed my life".

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helen842000 10y ago

It seems a lose-lose situation to get readers to pay to consume content. The most valuable part of Medium is that it has a large audience that writers want to reach. Surely a better monetization strategy would be to allow promoted posts so that even the individual creator can pay to reach more readers.

tvanantwerp 10y ago

One of the biggest turn-offs when I'm thinking about clicking a link to an article is seeing that it's at Medium. So many things there are of such low quality that I can't imagine wanting to pay for it. If anything, I would pay whomever could find a way to forever remove half-baked think pieces and Silicon Valley posturing from my life.

laurentdc 10y ago
I think that has to do with writers, not with Medium itself as a platform
- iamdave 10y ago
  You're not wrong, but you also can't help the perception people have if this is in fact a large enough perception; and IMO I've at moments held this perception myself. I know it isn't Medium's fault, but it's something the medium of Medium.com enables with the "anyone can publish" approach. That's not necessarily a bad thing on its face, but it is something that exists.
- CM30 10y ago
  Perhaps, though I hear that part of the reason those stereotypical Medium 'inspiration' pieces are so common is because they're the easiest type of content to make popular on the service. In some sense, the issue is that Medium seems to be rewarding this content at the expense of deeper, more interesting stories.

api 10y ago

Will they pay their writers or is this a magazine staffed by crowdsourced unpaid interns?

deleted 10y ago
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lancewiggs 10y ago
That's the issue. They are breaking the standard contract between the reader and writer: - We readers only pay if the writer is paid. - We writers only write for free if the reader does not have to pay.

iamdave 10y ago

A lot of attention is being put in this piece as to how this will affect the reader - which okay, this is ostensibly a service built for readers and I get that. I'm genuinely and truly hoping though Medium plans to address how this will impact writers on the platform. Not only do I have my own publication on Medium, I contribute to a column ran by a major name in sports journalism. How is this subscription service going to benefit writers? Will it at all? I don't know if I can keep my publication on a site that's charging my readers while I continue to write for free-though I understand Ev and Co.'s want to monetize the platform. When there's a element of everyone contributing content for the same reward (eyeballs and shares), suddenly bringing money into this has me as a writer wondering "Okay, I provide value to your platform by driving visitors to the site, but now you're telling me you plan to charge my readers? That's cool, but what's in it for me?"

criddell 10y ago
> That's cool, but what's in it for me? That's probably the last question they want writers asking because it's a very hard one for them to answer. So why are you publishing on Medium? You could pay for hosting and keep total control of what you publish and how it's presented. Instead, you give control to Medium and what do you get in return? You avoid paying $10 every month to a hosting provider I guess, but is that what your work is worth?
- iamdave 10y ago
  >You avoid paying $10 every month to a hosting provider I guess, but is that what your work is worth? Great question, I've been asked that before and here's the closest thing I can get to what I think is a fair answer: The work? No. It may be worth less, it may be worth more to others, to me it's definitely worth more. But My time, on the other hand? By publishing on Medium I'm saving a lot of time I otherwise wouldn't get back from self-hosting. Let me unpack that a bit, maybe you can provide some insight because I'd like to hear some perspectives on this I hadn't previously considered. Keep in mind, I'm a SysAdmin during the day for a company that hosts many client sites so this is a lot of stuff I do 9-5, so I really don't want to do it after 5 if I can get out of it. Self-hosting for me means the following: * Spinning up a DO droplet (or Linode or whatever cloud provider you pick) and all of the ancillaries like domain, email etc * Installing and configuring the platform (I went from WordPress to Ghost, back to WordPress) * Making sure my installation is secure, making sure my host node is secure * Promoting posts, keeping SEO and discoverability up-to-date, keeping my shareable URLs in check, etc. That's a lot of work to put into self-hosting-and granted a lot of this stuff is "set it and forget it"-but when my last blog got hacked twice in a row despite checking off all the best practices for WP security-I wanted to go somewhere that allowed me to do three things and do them quickly: (1) Start a site (2) Publish posts (3) Promote them as effortlessly as possible. Medium fit the bill brilliantly. I love their editor, I like the discoverability of other writers through the community, and it's a one-stop-shop between my site and the sports site I write for. Big wall of text, hope that answers your question, but I'm curious what you think of this take, if you're willing? postscript: I have recently discovered and managed to get a site up and running via Jekyll+Github pages and there's a very good chance it will become my main platform, I'm still testing out a few aspects but I'm liking what I see so far.

jpeg_hero 10y ago

> Founded in 2011, Medium has raised $132 million, and now it looks like there’s a plan to start making good on those investments. Oh, the snark. Yeah, you don't pay back $132m getting people to pay for bog standard blog posts.

openmosix 10y ago
I think Medium raised the $132M with the promise of "we will disrupt how news are produced and consumed". A monthly subscription of a digital magazine does not seem a so disruptive concept. The only disruption is to have people to write article for free while you charge for its reading.

kristianc 10y ago

I'm struggling to work out what Medium is going to offer in an 'upgraded' reading experience that is going to make it worth paying for. The problem that they face is that the core asset they own - other people's content - just isn't that compelling. There are a couple of reasons for this, but here are a couple: - People go to Medium to find an audience for their work. Medium has no meaningful brand / identity / curation / editorial voice of its own, so Medium posts tend to be posts that people have thrown up their, tagged, and hoped to find an audience. - There's very little way of an author or a writer building their brand through Medium. This is because all of the articles are presented in exactly the same way with the exact same layout features. Even if I remember an article, I'm going to struggle to remember who wrote it. - Although Medium launched with the promise of helping to launch undiscovered writers and rewarding attention minutes, in practice this has actually ended up being 'he or she who has the most Twitter followers wins'. This means that the same folks who win on Twitter, and Medium simply ends up being another outlet for their voice. - People who are prepared to wade through all of the above on the off chance that they'll strike it lucky and their article will end up with a few thousand shares have worked out how to game Medium. This has filled Medium with the kind of low grade motivational bullshit no one in their right mind would pay for. - It's really hard to believe any pitch that starts with 'I know we've ploughed through $132m in venture money so far, but it'll all get better when we ask people to pay for it.' Either Medium has some very heavyweight content partners lined up - in which case, the rank and file creators are just SEO fodder - or Medium is doomed.

sAbakumoff 10y ago
>This is because all of the articles are presented in exactly the same way with the exact same layout features. But what about communities like Hacker Noon? If I publish a medium article in such a community, at least the header differs from the regular medium's one > People who are prepared to wade through all of the above on the off chance that they'll strike it lucky and their article will end up with a few thousand shares have worked out how to game Medium From my personal observations, sharing a link to an interesting medium article in Reddit and HN can generate quite a traffic. I've got 13.5K reads for one of my stories by using this way, that's hardly any kind of "game" can be found there.
10y ago

dangerboysteve 10y ago

My issue with Medium is low barrier to entry for most authors. Whenever I see a HN post which links to Medium I never click on it. I have read many Medium post which ended up being self promotional pieces with little or no substance or flat out click-bait.

vermontdevil 10y ago

How is the Svbtle model working out? The one where they charge content creators $ to host on their site but readers get to read the content for free. Maybe Medium should have gone this way instead. I find it difficult that there's a working model in which subscription from the readers is going to be sufficient enough to survive, much less grow. Of course certain site s are capable of doing this (NYT, Economist, etc). Medium? I dunno.

gumby 10y ago

How often does a channel become a brand name? Netflix became a household name in the DVD era because they had a unique and useful value prop. Ditto Facebook (well, not unique at time of creation but they managed it very well). But nobody says they want to sit down to watch an NBC show or some RCA music. Even when you manage the content creation the name brand is hard to maintain Yes, Disney and many of its sub brands, and a very small number of news sources like NYT, but they are the exception. In fact the channel model tends not only to be a painful business (has to be made up in volume) but chews up the branding further downstream (car companies worry about being genericized by self-driving fleet managers). Medium has chosen a tough row to how.

gumby 10y ago
> Medium has chosen a tough row to how. Goddamn you iOS autocorrect, "hoe" is a perfectly reasonable word!

castle-bravo 10y ago

Does this mean that it'll be harder to accidentally end up on Medium? If so, great.