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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 f
by 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.
- CM30 10y ago> - 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. Yep, I know what you mean here. Medium has basically just become another platform for the already popular to get more popular. There is pretty much zero interest from the staff in regards to helping upcoming publications and writers get any attention. Heck, the best 'way' I've seen suggested to get popular on Medium is literally buying Twitter and Facebook ads for your stories and tagging them with Medium. And based on how the beta programs and stuff are being implemented, this only seems to be getting worse there. Want to make money from your work? Then you apparently need to be a currently popular publication owner associated with a large media business with its own major following: https://blog.medium.com/revenue-on-medium-5e7e6218f70c#.6qmurbcey https://blog.medium.com/revenue-on-medium-5e7e6218f70c#.6qmu... So now if you're unpopular there, you both have no obvious way to get noticed and no way to make money from their services. It's like Medium is trying to go the YouTube route... focus all the attention on existing brands and celebrities, do little for the smaller creators that made it worth visiting to begin with.
- doctorgriffin 10y agoThe quality of the content on Medium is generally too poor to support a site-wide subscription model. If they pursue that route, then they are doomed. (They’re probably doomed anyway.) Medium is a blogging platform. Ev may have aspired to something greater, but in the end he’s simply built a competitor to Wordpress. So embrace that. Charge users a monthly or yearly fee for the platform, like Wordpress.com. Allow users to personalize a bit. Make it easy for individual users to add a paid subscription option to their sites (and then take 10 percent as a fee). Make it easy for readers to bundle multiple sites on the platform under a single discounted subscription (with 90 percent of the revenue returning to the sites). Giver users an opportunity to buy promotion across the entire network of sites. There’s a market for a platform that’s prettier, easier, and more networked than Wordpress. Subscription should be a feature on that platform, not Medium’s primary revenue stream.
- petra 10y agoI don't think the medium of today is what the intend to charge money on, and it may even be possible that they intentionally made it worse , to differentiate their paid product. But : What if their product is about amazing curation on the consumer side ? And on the writer side - it promises writers access to better readers ? for example, if i'm a professional and i wrote a great article about some industry, i'll get more relevant people(so i'll market my idea more effectively), i'll get a higher share of relevant people(and hence the discussion will be much higher quality), and i'll get a better chance to connect to highly relevant individuals ?
- tedmiston 10y ago> I don't think the medium of today is what the intend to charge money on I get the impression that the service will be sort of Newsstand / Feedly meets Spotify.