Revenue on Medium

I prefer to hope that they intend to maintain some semblance of quality.

> Of course if they made it based on popularity / page views then it will just encourage click-bait articles even more so it's a somewhat damned-if-you-do scenario.

I've spent some time thinking about this (but eventually chose to pursue a project where the biggest challenge was technical rather than the business model), and there's another consideration you don't mention:

The total value that a publisher gets from a platform like Medium does not grow proportionally with the publisher's size, only a fraction of the value does. Specifically, the technical work that Medium does to scale the website, and the exposure that popular publishers get from being featured on the Medium homepage, Editor's picks, etc. However, the more popular a publisher gets, the more the balance tips in favor of leaving Medium for something with lower marginal cost to the publisher, like self-hosting. (These also tend to offer the publisher significantly more control.) As a result, to keep popular publishers on the platform, Medium has to lower their margins for them, whether by special deals or otherwise. This is the downside of Medium's platform having only a modest network effect: only modest network lock-in. (The upside was a minimal chicken-and-egg problem.)

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Also, re click-bait:

I think it's worth drawing attention to the fact that readers are discouraged from supporting publishers with one-time payments (it's presumably still technically possible by signing-up for and then immediately canceling a monthly membership). If most of a publisher's revenue is from recurring payments due to the loyalty of readers, rather than one-time payments like ad impressions or micropayments or a Reddit gold-equivalent, that helps mitigate the incentives favoring cheap click-bait.

Wait, you don't think big companies negotiate lower rates with AWS do you? Oh god that'd be so unfair!

Yeah. Tbh, at this point, I think sponsored content is here to stay as a serious funding model for publishers. I just hope its well marked.

People have shown they aren't willing [for whatever reason] to buy content with cash directly so the alternative is for it to push an agenda that is paid for with cash.

I think it's pretty naive to think this wouldn't happen if no one block ads.

This is already all over the place in magazines and newspapers, where ads are not "blockable".

At least with that model it can't include tracking across sites (if that's how they plan on implementing it). If the ads become too distasteful, then what might be cool is a white/black lister add-on that blacks out links you've blacklisted or only shows links you've whitelisted. As people blacklist, maybe they could opt-in to increment a public counter so companies can watch their numbers fly up when they add that full-screen, 5 second delay ad. I want this now actually, for paywall sites and sites that don't work with ad blockers so I know to not waste my time clicking a link.

Isn't "sponsored content" still required to carry a notice? In that case it should still be possible to block automatically...

Oh contraire! Ad-blockers already block sponsored content that is inter-mixed with non-sponsored. And because sponsored content generally must be disclosed there's no real way around it from the publisher's perspective.

There's a lot of value in not having to worry about self-promotion.

I'm not saying medium is great at that - they should have implemented reddit-like discovery system, with ability to sort by top posts of a year/month/etc, transparent front page algorithm, and browsing tags you are following separately from subscriptions. But they still did a lot of things right.

A platform with already existing audience, and a convenient subscribe button can make a big difference in the number of people who follow your stuff.

Clean design and WYSIWYG editor are very valuable as well. I'm a programmer, I prefer to use org-mode and markdown for my writing, so it was surprising to me how much I enjoyed writing on medium.

Beautiful design and being able to immediately see how awesome your final article looks, is, unexpectedly, really inspiring and makes the process of writing more fun.

Long story short: Article blacklisting!

Already successful with Patreon

We're using the same model with Baqqer for supporting founders and startups. It's working pretty well, although it's still a new concept relative to growing an idea into a business through the community.

I wonder about the long-term domain value-deterioration as the site hosted there becomes (or reveals itself to be) a native advertising platform.

It's more of a blogging engine. Compare to Wordpress.com.