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> But ... how do you monetize this without ads? Make something that people want instead of doi g the same as 163648462 others? There was a time where you earn

• arp242 6y ago
  That sounds great, and that's my plan exactly, but "free" is a great feature that's hard to compete against. People don't make rational decisions about these sort of things. I don't make rational decisions about these sort of things either. Although I try to be a bit thoughtful and rational about this, I've noticed I've spent ridiculous amounts of time to avoid fairly small charges, especially before I realized this and started paying attention to this. Point in case: half the articles posted to HN from medium.com have complaints about their (ad-free) monetization strategy. From what I can tell, Medium is not even profitable either; they're doing their best to find something that works without plastering every article full of ads, but thus far haven't found it yet. Even Twitter has the same problem: they've got some ads but unlike e.g. Facebook it's not full of them, and they're not profitable either.
  • jart 6y ago
    Medium could squeeze all the blog posts in the world and it still wouldn't be enough to pay rent for its eighty-five San Francisco employees. Hosting documents is so costly that we've come to sympathize with platforms like paupers and where that leaves humble content creators such as myself I don't know.
    • arp242 6y ago
      Apparently Medium seems to provide value to people writing articles. I don't really understand the appeal myself either, but who am I to argue with other people's software choices? shrug