5 ms·

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.

by 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.
  - discreditable 10y ago
    You can avoid the bulk of the irritations you mentioned by using a static website generator and hosting content on a shared host. I host a few static websites on nearlyfreespeech.net that get maybe ~5-10k visitors per month in total. NFS.net is usage-based, and static sites are very cheap. My total bill for 2016 was 82 cents. On top of being dirt cheap, I don't need to worry about maintaining the server or platform.
    - iamdave 10y ago
      Aye, you may have commented before I edited and added the line at the bottom but I recently started running a small-site with Jekyll and Github Pages. There's an excellent change it may become my default platform.
      - discreditable 10y ago
        I'd encourage you to look at other generators as well. Jekyll and Octopress are the big ones. I'm a little soured on Octopress at the moment because I don't like the way it manages ruby dependencies. I plan to evaluate pelican soon to see if the situation is any better. I'd also advocate using a real host instead of gh-pages because it gives you more control. In my case I like using TLS on my own domain.
        iamdave 10y ago
        Re: Jekyll hosting anyone you'd recommend? As far as control goes, gh-pages has met almost all of my needs as I can use proper and semantic markup, use a custom domain and such. In your opinion what am I missing out on based on my above comments that should be considered? I appreciate the feedback so far, you've raised some good points to think about.
        grzm 10y ago
        AWS S3 can work well.
CM30 10y ago
Agreed. When I read that Medium were doing subscriptions, I was like "cool, I'll be able to charge people to read my content on Medium". I likely wouldn't get a lot of paying subscribers reading my content, but I guess I'd get at least a few. Yet every article seems to make this out as 'Medium charges for content, writers continue getting sod all for it'. Sorry Medium, but if turns out to be more than the latter than the former, then I'll stop writing on your platform. If you're implementing a bunch of ways to make money, let the creators on your site use them to make money from their own works. We're not writing for free so you can charge people money to read it.
- iamdave 10y ago
  Bingo. While other commenters have brought up some very real benefits to self-hosting/self-publishing, monetizing the platform presents a real opportunity to make real money from your work and determine value of what gets written. I imagine it'll be harder to paywall one's own blog in the vacuum of a "blog brand". That's enticing to me greatly, but it's absolutely worth considering tradeoffs.
- criddell 10y ago
  > cool, I'll be able to charge people to read my content on Medium You know, I never thought of it that way but the more I think about it, the more I think your idea is a great one. Let writers paywall their work and take 30% (similar to the app store model). Let me buy $0.99 articles and I probably would. I've bought $1 Kindle singles before and this sounds like it could be similar.

by iamdave 10y ago

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.
- discreditable 10y ago
  You can avoid the bulk of the irritations you mentioned by using a static website generator and hosting content on a shared host. I host a few static websites on nearlyfreespeech.net that get maybe ~5-10k visitors per month in total. NFS.net is usage-based, and static sites are very cheap. My total bill for 2016 was 82 cents. On top of being dirt cheap, I don't need to worry about maintaining the server or platform.
  - iamdave 10y ago
    Aye, you may have commented before I edited and added the line at the bottom but I recently started running a small-site with Jekyll and Github Pages. There's an excellent change it may become my default platform.
    - discreditable 10y ago
      I'd encourage you to look at other generators as well. Jekyll and Octopress are the big ones. I'm a little soured on Octopress at the moment because I don't like the way it manages ruby dependencies. I plan to evaluate pelican soon to see if the situation is any better. I'd also advocate using a real host instead of gh-pages because it gives you more control. In my case I like using TLS on my own domain.
      - iamdave 10y ago
        Re: Jekyll hosting anyone you'd recommend? As far as control goes, gh-pages has met almost all of my needs as I can use proper and semantic markup, use a custom domain and such. In your opinion what am I missing out on based on my above comments that should be considered? I appreciate the feedback so far, you've raised some good points to think about.
        grzm 10y ago
        AWS S3 can work well.

CM30 10y ago

Agreed. When I read that Medium were doing subscriptions, I was like "cool, I'll be able to charge people to read my content on Medium". I likely wouldn't get a lot of paying subscribers reading my content, but I guess I'd get at least a few. Yet every article seems to make this out as 'Medium charges for content, writers continue getting sod all for it'. Sorry Medium, but if turns out to be more than the latter than the former, then I'll stop writing on your platform. If you're implementing a bunch of ways to make money, let the creators on your site use them to make money from their own works. We're not writing for free so you can charge people money to read it.

iamdave 10y ago
Bingo. While other commenters have brought up some very real benefits to self-hosting/self-publishing, monetizing the platform presents a real opportunity to make real money from your work and determine value of what gets written. I imagine it'll be harder to paywall one's own blog in the vacuum of a "blog brand". That's enticing to me greatly, but it's absolutely worth considering tradeoffs.
criddell 10y ago
> cool, I'll be able to charge people to read my content on Medium You know, I never thought of it that way but the more I think about it, the more I think your idea is a great one. Let writers paywall their work and take 30% (similar to the app store model). Let me buy $0.99 articles and I probably would. I've bought $1 Kindle singles before and this sounds like it could be similar.