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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to think what the other non ad based models might be:

1. SAAS Freemium: It's free to write on Medium, but if you want a real domain and a few more features pay $10/mo

2. Patreon-ish: Direct monthly sponsorship (subscription) to individual authors

3. Fractional Payment: Overall subscription to Medium as a service payed by readers. Authors are paid according to a formula for how many people viewed their content each month.

Any I missed?

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>1. SAAS Freemium: It's free to write on Medium, but if you want a real domain and a few more features pay $10/mo

I think this is a fantastic idea. It has worked on many other platforms such as shared hosting before.

>2. Patreon-ish: Direct monthly sponsorship (subscription) to individual authors

This is also a great model because it allows readers to pay for content that they consider worth while. It has the capability to increase overall content quality, become a platform for new writers, and medium could scrape some small amount of dough off the top for the service they are providing.

>3. Fractional Payment: Overall subscription to Medium as a service payed by readers. Authors are paid according to a formula for how many people viewed their content each month.

I don't think this is a great idea to be honest. This is essentially how click farms already work and has lead to the uprise in clickbait. I see this as the primary reason why sites like Buzzfeed exist.

Medium should be an AI-first company. Instead of the suggestion above for "formula for how many people viewed their content each month" it should be investing its time into generating the best of humanity's thoughts and writings and ideas with the vision that AI content generation will be the future of publication.

I agree. It would be fantastic to have access to a writing platform that focuses entirely on content quality as it's product.

I've been thinking about 2 as a potential path forward for journalists/journalism. Is there a reason to continue the monolithic paper over directly funding individual journalists?

I think there's a cool idea in a platform designed like this... somewhere in between Kickstarter, Patreon, and NPR, but with a whole bunch of tools for news consumers to discover, read, and support both journalists and stories they're interested in. Things like supporting and discovering topics like "local region politics", "travel", or "technology", while allowing journalists to describe their backgrounds, political leanings, etc, might be a way of addressing trust and transparency in journalism and journalistic leanings while also allowing a range of opinions and perspectives on one platform, rather than being driven solely by editorial control.

I love this idea. I'd honestly be really excited to take it on as some sort of side project. The company/application itself could be an extension of the idea. Open source the whole thing and let the community help improve it while using a patreon-esque model to support the core developers/maintainers.

I think that's pretty clever. Spent 15 min talking about it with coworkers today though, and IMO the challenge with something like this is identifying and specifically addressing the problems it would be trying to solve rather than boiling the ocean and hoping it does the "right thing".

I think it requires some more thought.

>3. Fractional Payment: Overall subscription to Medium as a service payed by readers. Authors are paid according to a formula for how many people viewed their content each month.

For the love of god, please no. This will only encourage clickbait. It would be better if the reader could buy a subscription and dictate how the subscription revenue should be split, i.e. writer A gets X%, writer B gets Y%, etc.

Your ideas aren't even mutually exclusive! They could have multiple tiers of membership: a lurker who pays to read ad-free, a promoter who drives traffic and provides good feedback for free, or a quality publisher who actually gets paid to write.

I'd really love to see Medium develop into a marketplace for content, driven by membership AND ad revenue.

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