Comment by epberry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epberry | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing I read several Medium articles a month. Some of them are really well produced - Transit's engineering post on beautifying their maps, Remix's post about public transportation planning and ILP, and Karpathy's post on backprop come to mind. So I hope Medium sticks around because I get a lot of value out of them. Would I pay for this value? I think I actually would, but maybe only for stories I finish and think are good. For example I would pay a lot for the stories above but I would almost rather Medium pay me for posts which turn out to be thinly veiled marketing that I stop reading halfway through (I realize Transit's and Remix's posts could be construed as such but hey, the technical content was deep). I suppose a flat fee is better for the business but I could be more convinced to plunk down the credit card at the beginning if I was charged based on usage, like time spent reading on the site.

Also, let me just take a moment to once again rage against Business Insider for writing a pretty bad article. The whole thing seemed purposefully antagonistic and full of sarcastic language. Maybe it's because BI is the exact type of operation Medium is trying to kill, but I think those MAU numbers actually warrant some optimism! To be fair, Medium probably should have provided some people to counterbalance all those angry publishers...

Have you heard of https://blendle.com/ ? They brand themselves as 'Spotify for journalism', with a pay-per-article approach, with an instant refund if you don't like the article. I only started using them a couple of days ago, so I don't have any further useful comment, but it seems like a promising approach.

If they would be Spotify for journalism wouldn't they have a flat fee?

I think it is an analogy (pick whatever you want from whichever supplier you want, without having to sub to them individually) more than an exact duplication.

Well, the point of the analogy was to illustrate the business model.

I think there's room for a spotify model in writing. As a consumer, instead of a centralised platform, I'd like it to be an integration on the various websites I get content from.

I.e. the normal internet with it's various publishing engines, but paywall automatically bypased, ads automatically disabled and producer automatically credited & paid because I'm signed in to my 'servicename' account.

Blendle is a solution to a very different problem. Blendle provides unbundling for popular magazines and newspapers, i.e. you can selectively read single articles for < 1€ rather than having to buy a full issue of the paper in question.

It's really well done, but basically does what the iTunes store did for MP3s.

What Medium faces is a rather different beast: Trying to reach the holy grail of finding non-advertising funding for journalism (ideally, without a subscription-based model).

I think Blendle's funding model has potential. Of particular importance is how smooth it is to read, and just as easy to say 'nope, not for this one', or not.

I've read good things on Medium, but if anything Sturgeon's Law is too generous regarding overall quality. Considering the nature of the beast, I'm not even sure it is possible to change the quality ratio without potentially breaking what Medium is.

I'd be happy chipping in sub-dollar amounts here and there for the good stuff, but I am not going to pay a flat fee for access to what amounts to a whole lot of tripe and just a few meatballs.

That's what I like about Blendle's model. I'm an infrequent user (< 1 article a month) but I probably spent more on Blendle than the cost of a subscription to any one of Blendle's sources.

Out of all the articles I read, I think I clicked the refund button maybe twice, and that was only because the article was truly terrible.

I can say with certainty that I wouldn't have bothered reading any of these paywalled articles if Blendle didn't exist.

I just don't think there are enough people in America right now with any extra money to spend on articles. The middle class has to worry about paying for food and necessities. Millennials can't afford cable, and people think they will pay for internet articles they are used to getting for free? That business model is doomed from day one.

I'm not sure that's true, I just think the price has to be right. For example, I would gladly pay a penny (UK money) per month to access an ad-free Medium, even though I never consciously visit that site, just because it's such a small amount of money that it's not worth bothering over. Same would go, for example, for Hacker News.

Obviously, a penny is a ridiculous under-exaggeration, but I feel it demonstrates the point well; 60,000,000 times a penny isn't bad money. And clearly a real-world business model would charge at least an order of magnitude more than that.

The real problem here is transferring that money in a cost-effective way. Would it be impossible for a central gateway to manage that task, charging providers a small fee for the service?

People made similar arguments about selling MP3's when piracy was free. As soon as Apple was able to remove enough friction from the buying process, the market exploded.

Even people with the most modest of incomes used to regularly pay a quarter to read the daily newspaper. I see no reason why they wouldn't again, if the process was smooth enough.

I'm surrounded by millennials, and most of the pay for Spotify and Netflix, or share an account with family members.

Furthermore, while I'm not 'poor', I'm quite frugal, and yet I've spent quite a bit of money already on Blendle articles.

The biggest hurdle in my case was signing up and connecting my account to a payment system. But once that barrier was crossed, paying somewhere between 10 cents and 1 euro on a article became a (concerning) easy thing to do. I suspect I'm not alone in this.

Actually, the substance of the article wasn't that bad, but after looking again at the browser title, I realized the title didn't square with the article at all, as usual.

Also, I think I would pay for the site, definitely, as long as it still somewhat pays publishers who contribute freely to the site in some cases.

If they did turn into a subscription model... what would you be willing to pay per month? 7.99-9.99,maybe 19.99?

Medium has to compete with the rest of the blogging ecosystem, where many of their articles are actually cross-posted from personal blogs. The rest of that entire world, content is free or donation-driven, so the value of a Medium post is effectively nil. Arguably negative, for the feel-good garbage and corporate submarine PR.

Seriously? No.

Maybe about the price of a print magazine, though.

Have you ever paid for a print magazine that doesn't have ads? They are usually at least $10.

For some reason, I've started receiving a few magazines at my house that I never asked for: Popular Science, Wired, and Cosmopolitan. They show up for six months, then stop coming. A year later they start again.

Buying a "New Yorker" magazine on a news stand cost me upwards of $8

So even print is not that cheap it seems

Medium should team up with https://brave.com, would propably we most effortless option to get some revenue.

Do you have a link to the ILP one?

I imagine it is that one: https://blog.remix.com/an-intro-to-integer-programming-for-e...

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