Official blog of Medium, the publishing platform, covering product changes, the Partner Program, and company strategy.
HN commenters cite it when discussing Medium's struggle to find a business model, its move away from ads, and its management experiments.
After the Medium announcement in January, I've been very curious what their new direction would turn out to be. I'll be waiting to see how it plays out before judging, but this really is not what I was hoping for.
It seems clear that there is a new appetite for paying to support quality content that did not exist four months ago.
But I already pay for quality content that is curated by an editorial authority (The Washington Post, etc.).
I'm still looking for way to support good content that is too niche for mass-market consumption.
What I really want is a micropayments service that saves a record of every blog post I want to support. Then, at the end of the month, I can set my "subscription" budget and allocate it to the creator of each saved post based on the value I got from it and my desire to see the creator produce similar content.
Basically I want to:
1. support content I read
2. but not blow my monthly budget by paying a fixed price per piece
3. and not support clickbait junk just because I was linked to it and read it
So from a monthly a budget of $20, a couple really good posts might get $1 or $2. NYTimes CPM is $8 (or $0.008 per ad view) [2] so even $0.05 - $0.10 for an average article beats top-end ad revenues, except for sites with highly targeted audiences (assuming no one clicks the ads, which is almost entirely the case for certain audiences that might care about high quality content).
I think Flattr is supposed to work to be a little like…
Is it though?
Pyra Labs (Blogger) was Evan Williams earlier adventure and Google acquired it in 2003. Evan Williams later went on to co-found Twitter and in 2012, founded Medium. I checked Crunchbase and as of 2016 they’ve taken on $132M across 3 funding rounds and as of at least last year, they are not profitable[1].
I remember the buzz around Medium back when it launched, Ev Williams was going to try and do something new and exciting with text and don’t call it a blog platform, it’ll be like Twitter but with longer form text and anyone could write for it, etc.
The reading experience was good, it did (and probably still does, but I don’t read anything on Medium anymore) have an interesting take on comments, and anyone could write for it. But it’s a blog platform. It is Ev Williams second crack at Blogger with some of the lessons of Twitter, and the conceit that by locking up enough authors into a kind of Yahoo-style lobster trap[2], they can sell themselves as the New York Times[3] by being a kind of YouTube for text.
The thing about YouTube is that videos are relative to text, expensive to encode, decode, store and distribute, and YouTube has an audience that goes to YouTube to watch video. Text can be had anywhere, and while you won’t find many people that hate to watch videos, there are plenty of people that do hate to read, and Medium as it was originally conceived and before the dickbars[4] started rolling in and they had to start hacking engagement was a love…
As noted multiple times in the article, the unethical design we’re seeing in popular apps and services today is largely a result of the widespread use of advertising as a revenue model.
This is an appropriate time to show appreciation and support for the companies who are trying to demonstrate successful revenue models which are NOT based on advertising:
Medium - the replacement of “Recommends” with “Claps” was to allow Medium to better understand how much authors should be paid (with the money coming from the paid “Medium Member” plan). [1]
Patreon - probably the most popular service for paying independent content creators today. If you are a regular consumer of a content channel who’s creator is on Patreon and you haven’t already set up micro payments, then please part with a few pennies and help show the industry that an advertising revenue model isn’t the only option.
Wikipedia - Ad-free since its inception, and the web’s most popular encyclopaedia which is completely free to use for all. If you feel like you have the resources to part with a few dollars per month to support Wikipedia, and haven’t already done so, then please do. [2]
Please let me know if there are any others I’ve missed out.
[1] https://blog.medium.com/expanding-the-medium-partner-program-3be09dd146e4
[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give
All the commercial sites on Medium are finding new homes since the company abandoned the ad model earlier this year[0]
> Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people.
> We decided we needed to take a different — and bolder — approach to this problem. We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention.
> So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people.
It has created an opportunity for other platforms to pick up these marquee titles. I thought Medium providing the tech and ads for bloggers was a great idea - but for some reason they decided to abandon it.
[0] https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be
This philosophy isn't new for them, but they just sent out an email an hour ago that said:
> Beginning May 1, 2024, stories with AI-generated writing (disclosed as such or not) are not allowed to be paywalled as part of our Partner Program.
> Accounts that have fully AI-generated writing behind the paywall may have those stories removed from the paywall, and/or have their Partner Program enrollment revoked.
Original blog post where the philosophy was discussed: https://blog.medium.com/medium-is-for-human-storytelling-not-ai-generated-writing-b5f7ffdc96cf
> yet medium does not have ads
They did till 2017, when they gave on up on trying to scale, fired a third of their staff and decided to pivot, complete with the customary "renewing our focus / incredible journey" blog post.
https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be
> Nytimes
Of course the NYTimes has ads. They're one of the bigger publishers on the internet
https://advertising.nytimes.com/
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/06/profits-at-the-new-york-times-show-media-dinosaurs-are-ruling-the-internet/