Medium plans to launch a consumer subscription product this quarter
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
If I download a $2 app I might get lucky and use it right away in which case it might be a great value. Or it might require 30 minutes of setup and experimentation in which case it has already cost me more than the coffee.
Its like the lock-smith who slaves for an hour using a dozen tools vs. one who takes 30s and no tools. The latter is more skilled and served you better but will not feel as valuable. The artificial scarcity of an app and the work of "not preventing you downloading something" just doesn't ring our value bell.
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
i think the overarching point among all of this is that if you create a product or service that has implied continuous delivery of insight/experience/fun etc, then users might be more likely to be satisfied with their purchase
a $1.99 drum kit app might be an easier pill to swallow if the creator actively releases info on how to be a better musician, where to chat with super users...
Plus, you get an email confirming every subscription and renewal before the renewal is charged, with a link directly to that subscription so you can cancel it.
Not sure how it could be made much easier than that...
I actually don't think its purposely hidden. Saying I'd be impressed if anyone found it without googling it was probably a slight exaggeration, but it certainly isn't intuitive to me.
As far as emails go, I didn't know that, and you must be seeing something I'm not. I get a receipt with a bunch of links to Apple support. Tried every link and none of them take me directly to the subscription.
The point is less to do with Apples implementation of subscription service and more to do with my lack of trust behind them in general. Apple might do better than most, but I've been burned one time too many.
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.
I'm not quite convinced here (extending the 'app' concept to other software). Some of the price is subsidized by VC money, and some by advertising. In both cases the consumer/purchaser may not be aware of the real value of their purchase, nor the real cost. So the market hasn't finished speaking IMHO.
We can take the free market purist view that there needs to be no further discussion on the issue: the market has decided that high-quality journalism doesn't generate enough revenue to support itself, therefore, its intrinsically valueless.
Or, we stipulate that high-quality journalism is valuable becauae it has positive effects on society that are beyond the ability of the market to determine. If we think so, it makes sense to talk about how to fund these endevours that aren't reliant on free market forces.
(I realize you're talking about apps, but the topic of the article is content, and the same basic principles apply to both)
For coercion, people are naturally resistant to it, even when it is "good for them". Do you think it is a worthwhile investment to spend political capital on laws, regulations, enforcement etc to apply such coercion? Maybe if we use one of the subtler methods, i.e. taxation and subsidy? There's also the problem of the 1A which tends to negate most government action you can take in this sphere.
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?
I think the problem is the immediate reward and anticipation of the reward.
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.
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"
People who know me know I wouldn't promote something if it wasn't good, so the developers benefit from existing relationships.
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
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)
It seems like this hurdle is real.
headsup, your website says 2014 everywhere, it looks like an abandoned product
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.
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.
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.
There is definitely something about the physical aspect.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
I get the impression that the service will be sort of Newsstand / Feedly meets Spotify.
I'm not poopooing the idea of Medium going subscription, FWIW, but this author's call to arms is a bit ridiculous.
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)
Edit: This is the one Medium article I can remember really enjoying. [1]
[1] https://medium.com/@fernnews/imagining-the-post-antibiotics-...
If Medium were to go away, I suspect those links would just lead to a different site. What value does Medium add?
Really? Cheap date.
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.
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.
I thought it meant some social science term for disproportional migration to other countries by men.
I'm not sure if feminists claiming "manspreading" as patriarchal phenomenon are deliberately disingenuous or just plain stupid and uneducated. Being concerned with your reproductive health is a human right, men also have this right (if we would assume that men and women are equal). Spermatogenesis is dependent on male gonads to be about 2 centigrades below the core body temp; too high temperature reduces both quantity and quality of the sperm (that's the whole reason why scrotum is outside the body), I honestly thought even kids knew this.
I would say that from scientific perspective I'm much more concerned with "boobspreading" because it solely represents matriarchal oppression of men without serving any physiological function.
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?"
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?
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.
On top of being dirt cheap, I don't need to worry about maintaining the server or platform.
There's an excellent change it may become my default platform.
I'd also advocate using a real host instead of gh-pages because it gives you more control. In my case I like using TLS on my own domain.
In your opinion what am I missing out on based on my above comments that should be considered? I appreciate the feedback so far, you've raised some good points to think about.
The biggest advantage of my own host is TLS with my custom domain. Last time I checked, gh-pages doesn't do that. I'm a big proponent of encrypting the web, so that alone is enough for me.
On top of TLS, using a real host gives me some control I wouldn't have on gh-pages. I can use .htaccess to redirect pages, set cache expiry times, and server headers (such as strict-transport-security). All of that makes it worth the very low cost of entry.
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.
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.
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.
update: the original post has been changed... it was a medium post with a full screen cover image.
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 ...
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.
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.
Honestly, everything you can do on Medium you could do on any easy-to-use website generator from the early 90's.
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".
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.
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.
Goddamn you iOS autocorrect, "hoe" is a perfectly reasonable word!
Oh, the snark. Yeah, you don't pay back $132m getting people to pay for bog standard blog posts.
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.
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.
That's not necessarily a bad thing on its face, but it is something that exists.
In some sense, the issue is that Medium seems to be rewarding this content at the expense of deeper, more interesting stories.
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.
A subscription model is different?
mods: maybe change the URL to https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/ ?
(edit: thank you mods)