Medium plans to launch a consumer subscription product this quarter

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/

by chmars • 9 years ago

67 113 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

chebum• 9 years ago

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

tristanj• 9 years ago

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

alvil• 9 years ago

Wow? :D Never mind.

akoster• 9 years ago

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

ptrptr• 9 years ago

Removing “highlights from other users” would be appreciated, IMO they are distracting and pointless.

ezekg• 9 years ago

Especially when readers go and highlight random spaces…

cyborgx7• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

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

Doctor_Fegg• 9 years 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/ ?

(edit: thank you mods)

te_chris2• 9 years 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.

lmm3• 9 years 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-mcgrady3• 9 years 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.

Veen2• 9 years ago

Really? I've never read anything on medium approaching the depth and erudition of articles in the LRB, for example. Additionally, organizations like the LRB aren't just about the writing. The selection and editing is hugely important. There may be one or two fantastic articles buried amid the thousands of self-promotional, confessional, and ill-considered pieces of tripe that fill medium, but I don't have the time or the inclination to find them.

te_chris2• 9 years ago

"I think I read more and better content on medium than all of those put together."

Really? Cheap date.

aaron-lebo• 9 years ago

Yeah, I don't understand the appeal.

The Medium community is pretty insular. Check out what's popular and it is a very narrow part of society - basically what appeals to someone in the Bay Area. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that but why pay money for it? If it couldn't attract a larger audience while being open, this is going to only embed that in-crowd further. And, like you said, in asking people to play money, you are now competing against more diverse free content that is both professional and amateur.

The average Medium blog post is already pretty forgettable, there are a lot more quality things to spend money on. I get just as much if not more value from HN or Reddit and don't have to pay a dime. I don't know who's going to pay for this.

edit: this is what currently shows up on the frontpage:

* An open letter to Jason Chaffetz from someone who attended his town hall

* Why did I name it “Dear White People?”

* Acquisitions, Mergers, and the Purge

* 11 Essential Movies About The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees

* Tech and the Fake Market tactic

* The Alt-Right Is A Doomsday Cult

* This May Be the Most Exhaustive Study of Manspreading Ever Conducted

etc

That's an incredibly narrow worldview that's only going to turn off people who don't come from it. It's a bunch of political op-eds. You don't have to pay money for that! You can go to any Internet forum and find it.

bshimmin2• 9 years ago

I was feeling masochistic so I read the "manspreading" article (having first googled "manspreading", a term I hadn't heard before and wish I hadn't now).

Having read this piece, I think the only viable decision Ev Williams can make is to return all the money to the investors and switch the whole thing off, right now.

Ralfp• 9 years ago

I've started treating Medium's staff picks as reference of what's US's caviar left is currently about, but I can't really blame them. They go for 'Valleys interests in tech culture and controversy that US academia/progressives are discussing at the moment. Two groups they are targeting and that overlap over each other. I'm still finding interesting read on Medium, just from other authors and subjects.

hochchristoph• 9 years ago

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

jarofgreen2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

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• 9 years ago

... hosted on Vimeo instead of YouTube, heh.

jarofgreen2• 9 years ago

Was an interesting talk, thanks!

ohstopitu• 9 years 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

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.

iamatworknow2• 9 years ago

Y'know what Medium reminds me of? Geocities with fewer features.

Honestly, everything you can do on Medium you could do on any easy-to-use website generator from the early 90's.

philjackson• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

Well, the coffee has a marginal cost that is non-trivial. Downloading an app has essentially zero marginal cost.

riprowan2• 9 years ago

The coffee also has, at best case, a one-use max.

k-mcgrady3• 9 years ago

How many consumers consider marginal cost when making a purchase though?

salesguy2222• 9 years ago

Thanks for your insight :) I think this is a true contributor to the situation. That physical product also provides a physical reward (taste, calories).

The relationship of speaking to a cashier, being in a warm building, feeling like you belong to the cool crowd, is a very deep psychological reward that in my opinion likely releases all sorts of chemicals in one's brain. This all furthers the reinforcement to buy again in the future.

On the software side, video games achieve many of the same effects. Feelings of belonging, both to a crowd and to digital images on a screen, deeply affect humans.

My bet is that a simple app that doesn't achieve this is a less justifiable purchase since there is no physical demand within the person to buy

tedmiston5• 9 years ago

On top of this I usually talk to my barista about tasting notes to help decide which coffee feels right that day. The coffee shop has also curated just a couple different kinds of quality beans out of the tens of thousands of different available offerings. This is a value add for me.

lojack3• 9 years ago

When I buy a coffee I also don't have to worry about it charging me $5 once a month forever unless I go through a maze of menu options (possibly involving phone calls) to get it to stop.

riprowan2• 9 years ago

Also, when you buy a coffee you don't have to worry that it might contain spyware or malware.

maneesh• 9 years ago

Do you worry about this with app store purchases? In app purchases I get it, but I've never been unfairly charged (or found it difficult to cancel) purchases that go through apple or google

pweissbrod• 9 years ago

Also when you buy a coffee you dont just download a bytewise clone of a coffee from some repo.

An hourly paid person must manually prepare fresh coffee using distributed physical goods multiple times a day and brew the cup full at every brick and mortar location.

This is not a very good analogy at all. Free market and competition have already decided the price of quality apps and quality coffee. The only way you can prove this wrong is by actually disrupting the market.

1337biz• 9 years ago

With the coffee you are buying an experience, an emotion. With most non-gaming apps not so much. Doing an cost-benefit analysis with an experience is much more subjective than what you can get out of an app.

antocv• 9 years ago

I think we are thrown into "cost-benefit analysis" to avoid being the only ones who pay.

When you go for coffee, you know everyone else pays the same, nobody gets coffee for free.

With digital goods, since they are so easy to copy, you wonder, am I a dumbass for shelling out even $1 when everyone else is getting it for free?

There is no way to know if others have bought this, if they have actually payed.

On top of that, its so simple, its too simple to pay, but with coffee you have to get your card out, find coins or whatever. Customer wonders, if its so simple, am I being ripped, what if I buy this by accident for several months?

martin-adams• 9 years ago

I bet people wouldn't pay $5 for a pumpkin spice latte that they can drink in 30 days time.

I think the problem is the immediate reward and anticipation of the reward.

paublyrne• 9 years ago

I think it's the physicality that's especially appealing to us. It's worth comparing the experience to buying a paper magazine. I am also more inclined to do buy a magazine without overthinking the purchase than I am to subscribe digitally to the same magazine. I know the content is worth something, but a physical item feels more valuable somehow. The same with buying DVDs or CDs. Although the content is the same, it feels more real when you can hold it.

kristianc2• 9 years ago

I can never work out if people who make this analogy are trying to guilt people into buying from them or just lack understanding of human psychology.

I'm willing to pay $5 for a Pumpkin Spice Latte because I know what I'm going to get. I'm going to get a tasty coffee and possible use of space and WiFi for a few hours if I want it. I have no idea what I'm going to get for an app. I may get something that is going to give me a few minutes of mindshare every day, or I may end up getting something which is completely useless. I have no way of knowing.

Starbucks also has no free alternatives. If I want to get a coffee when I'm in town I know I'm going to have to pay a certain price. There's no one handing out free coffee - or coffee that is free if I agree to read a few ads. That's not true of apps. Many apps have perfectly good free alternatives. The fact is, most of what Medium offers, I can get elsewhere. If what this amounts to is asking me to pay for Wait But Why, The Awl or the Ringer - I can get better elsewhere for free. There may be a price I'll pay for fuzzy thinkpieces that talk about how 'problematic' everything is, but it isn't very high.

If you want to get into non-free, $9.99 a month gets me either the entire history of recorded music, a selection of essential 'water-cooler' TV watching that I am going to be able to talk to other people about, or access to the entire archive of the Washington Post. I happily pay those and would probably pay 50% as much again, but it does mean that the bar for a glorified blog is very very high. I also have to say as far as Yipgo goes, then it had better be a damn good to-do list.

swalsh• 9 years ago

"Starbucks also has no free alternatives."

Actually, every day (when I worked in an office) I had to make the decision of "Do I want the kind of boring office coffee, which is free, or the slightly more exciting Starbucks coffeee"

RileyKyeden• 9 years ago

This is why I plug the few apps/tools I pay for to everyone who'll listen. I want the developers to thrive, both because they made my life better enough to get money from me, and because I know how hard it is to sell non-physical stuff.

People who know me know I wouldn't promote something if it wasn't good, so the developers benefit from existing relationships.

wslh• 9 years ago

"We live in a world where digital products are inherently undervalued relative to other products..."

Thank you for the notification. I can't believe someone with business experience can make this really naive statement. This is an issue in almost every digital business. Last week there was a related thread about value creation here: http://continuations.com/post/156889798325/value-creation

jasode• 9 years ago

about quote: "We live in a world where digital products are inherently undervalued relative to other products."

That author describing it as a single category called "digital products" doesn't really explain it. There are lots of non-physical digital products that people will pay for. It's really the smartphone apps in particular that's a special category of negative psychology.

After the initial novelty[1] of buying apps in 2008 died away, people realized that smartphone apps were a waste of money. People would buy an app and then later experience buyer's remorse. They felt ripped off.

Therefore, the previous bad experiences provide no reinforcement for future purchases. Compare that with consumers who buy a digital song for $0.99 from Taylor Swift and then that enjoyment reinforces the idea that it's ok to pay $0.99 again for an Adele song. Or Kindle owners who pay $9.99 for the latest ebook from Stephen King and then willingly pay that amount again months later for another bestseller. There are many other examples of repeated digital purchases.[2] (Using the positive reinforcement framework of thought, it's not that people pay for $5 coffee because it's a physical product -- it's that the previous $5 purchase of Starbucks gave them pleasure and therefore they willingly pay it again.)

If consumers really felt they got value from app store purchases like they do with iTunes songs, Kindles, Netflix, etc, they'd buy more. Therefore, the conclusion that smartphone owners undervalue digital products is not actually correct -- they actually value digital app store purchases as near-worthless because that's the utility they got from them.

Also, the avoidance of buying smartphone apps seems related to The Market for Lemons[3] and the thousands of terrible apps written by copycat incompetent programmers prevent people from discovering the truly quality apps that could improve their lives. A lot of bad apps flooding the market ruins it for everyone else.

[1] example: http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/23/iphone-fart-app-pulls-in-n...

[2] Netflix $9.99/month

Adobe Cloud apps $49.99/month (more digital subscribers than customers of physical CDs/DVDs)

boxing pay-per-view $99 (Mayweather vs Pacquiao)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

echelon• 9 years ago

I'm shocked by how many people (on HN!) responded to you and explained why they might not buy an app.

It seems like this hurdle is real.

HalfwayToDice• 9 years ago

"Yipgo"

headsup, your website says 2014 everywhere, it looks like an abandoned product

openmosix2• 9 years ago

This is an unfortunate by-product of the "Google" economy (better say, "VC" economy). Pricing, for the most part, is a psychological thing. When 99.9% of the web products are "free", a $9.99/mo product requires a lot of explanations. If every bar out there would give coffee away for free (to sell you ads in the bar), would you still justify/buy the $5.99 vanilla latte? Possible, but the market would significantly shrink. It also does not help that most of the SV "businesses" do not operate according to business metrics, but following vanity metrics - like monthly recurring active users per square feet (or, worse, by how much they have raised - i.e. debts)

hawski• 9 years ago

I think that it comes down to friction. When you go for a coffee you will give cash or you will use card. When you use card it can be one of quite easy options: signature, PIN or just contactless payment.

I was easier inclined to buy something on Play Store when it was just added to my phone bill. Only because I had to just write the password that I already know and use. Now if your service requires registration and one more password, it must be really worth it. Card payment is a bit of a hassle - imagine going to an odd store somewhere and going with the same procedure at the cash register. Write down your name, card number, valid-to date and CVV. Also a password and a billing address.

For me it is a hassle. I can't imagine how awful it must be for most users.

It still comes down to easy micropayments. Where one account will take you everywhere.

tedmiston5• 9 years ago

Personally I find tapping my phone on a Square Reader to buy a coffee easier than buying an app from the App Store today.

With apps, I may need to do extra things like type a long password, grab my CC to enter the CVV. Is it a big download? Well, maybe I should be on wifi first, etc.

Eridrus• 9 years ago

The comparison to coffee always seems like an odd one.

As a society we're physically addicted to and dependant on caffeine and lots of people are completely unwilling to spend $5 on coffee.

Honestly though, most apps are less useful than a cup of coffee, especially compared to the next best alternative. Medium is nice, but it's not $5/month better than Blogger.

Is it $5/yr better than Blogger? Maybe. But to make that work you need a cost structure that doesn't set money on fire.

wodenokoto• 9 years ago

The other day I realised that I am willing to pay more for a paper notebook than a note taking app.

There is definitely something about the physical aspect.

idiot_stick• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

bshimmin2• 9 years ago

This has now been unlinked from the original submission (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".

helen842000• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

I think that has to do with writers, not with Medium itself as a platform

iamdave6• 9 years 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.

CM303• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

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

lancewiggs• 9 years 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.

iamdave6• 9 years 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?"

criddell5• 9 years 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?

iamdave6• 9 years 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.

CM303• 9 years 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.

iamdave6• 9 years 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.

criddell5• 9 years 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.

jpeg_hero• 9 years 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.

openmosix2• 9 years 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.

kristianc2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

CM303• 9 years 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#.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.

petra2• 9 years ago

I 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 ?

tedmiston5• 9 years 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.

dangerboysteve• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

gumby2• 9 years 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.

gumby2• 9 years ago

Medium has chosen a tough row to how.

Goddamn you iOS autocorrect, "hoe" is a perfectly reasonable word!

castle-bravo• 9 years ago

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

Medium plans to launch a consumer subscription product this quarter

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