Medium releases Memberships

To see if this would be a feature I want, I went to Medium's "Staff Picks" page to see what they already care about. Front and center is an article about some kind of convention for twins. Also featured: a post about witches getting political and another post about design lessons learned from cats.

Not sold on Medium's ability to curate articles...

Sure, people may pay for good articles, but they definitely won't pay for a "new homepage" or "offline reading list," both of which should be standard in 2016.

This does not seem like a promising solution to Medium's existential revenue issues.

Ev is not wrong, media is broken. And the advertising system that feeds it is broken too. People reading articles generally aren't interested in 'random' advertising, trade magazines do ok because if you're interested in the trade there are vendors that supply that trade who can advertise in a very targeted way.

It would be interesting to have Medium partner up with Blendle (blendle.com) where you'd pay 0.05 to read a medium article, and the standard Blendle refund rules apply. Assuming 2 cents for Blendle, 2 cents for Medium and 1 cent for the author. An article with 80,000 'reads' would pay the author $800. It would be interesting to see if the capital outlay would provide the necessary curation to insure a quality queue of interesting things to read.

Right now, Medium is a very noisy site. Noisy in a good way. Lots of energy. Lots of advocacy posts, full of swear words for emphasis. It's become a place where bold new voices periodically show up to make a statement. (Talia Jane, etc.) I try to skim it a couple times a week. Skim is the key word; the site's stories are very hit or miss. It's possible to breeze past five duds in a row so quickly that I hardly notice, and that's okay.

Nothing about current Medium feels like it has the makings of a judicious, curated concert hall of careful writing. Signing up a few famous writers won't fix this mismatch. Erratic is a big part of Medium's brand right now, and to forfeit that in a belated dash to "quality" feels dismissive of what the brand stands for.

It's really hard for me to see Medium as a place for the kind of WSJ/FT paid content that's aimed at rich high achievers who want business or lifestyle tips that the masses don't know about. It's even harder to see it succeeding as a paid online home for long, magazine-style features. Too many rivals in every genre are giving it away.

Building up a paid online audience is hard work, and it goes slowly at first. Jessica Lessin at The Information is doing it about as well as anyone, and she's defined her mission very tightly.

This latest strategy switch by Medium seems very prone to trying a lot of different formats in a hurry, without the patience to stick with one quietly for 2-3 years, waiting for the first little bits of traction to take hold.

Initially we went with a similar membership concept, except people subscribed to one writer directly, and got access to the collective. It barely worked, and we moved over to more of a crowdfunding model which was about 100x more effective.

In the end we worked with major publications and hundreds of journalists, had a million dollar matching fund program, and paid out millions of dollars to writers directly, but it still didn't work as a big business.

This makes me think Medium is pretty clueless about what they are getting into - especially after raising more than $100 million.

Is he saying that subscription revenue is going to writers hand-picked by Medium editors and not driven by writers who have more readers? I don't get that approach. If anything, as a subscriber I'd want my subscription dollars to go to the writers of articles I've liked/recommended. Why are they demonizing those kinds of clicks?

Am I understanding this wrong?

Click through, and there is a vanity demo badge that says I was a "Member since March 2017" - wait, what? Scroll down - Ah, the first ever mention of money. $5 per month. Close browser window.

Something about the way they are trying to sell this doesn't sit well with me. If it is a paid subscription, then sell it from the outset as a subscription - not some sort of chic, cool membership in a secret society.

Granted Medium has some great articles, and I will still continue to publish my thoughts there, but there are too many 'listicles' and inane 'life lesson' articles for me to spend $5 per month on the platform.

Site-wide paywall won't work, since majority of writers do not want to limit access to their content and publish to get eyeballs. Metered access might solve that problem but a lot of testing is needed to figure out right amount of access limiting, so casual readers would never see a wall.

Premium section might work but big question is how to split revenue among writers and how to select writers. Share based on recommend count? Perhaps. How much would Medium have after payouts?

Premium feature(s) would work but what.

Giving existing, relatively big, publishers a monetization tool to create and manage subscriptions. Big question here is again, how much Medium would make after payouts?

Premium section seems like a lot of work but could work. Attracting big publishers and giving them great CMS and great way to monetize might work as well but it is a very different path.

Honestly I'm not sure what I'd really get from my $5. A single page browsing experience doesn't sound amazing. If anything, they should do that for everyone because the infinite scroll tends to just get people to read more.

For some of the more popular pages, like for example war is boring is one of my favs, they seem to generate a following unto themselves, probably by finding and targeting their niche audience. Most people on medium would probably find war is boring, well, boring.

It seems like the hard part is combining "thoughtful, well researched" with "interest of the reader" without becoming an echo chamber, censor, or deemed irrelevant by the reader.

It really rubs me the wrong way that I have to ask to be notified when medium will be ready for me to pay for this service.

So let's say I get 10 article credits for my monthly subscription. I'd be glad to "pay" $0.50 an article if I knew 80% went to the writer. Each writer would have to invest in as many free teaser articles that they needed to write in order develop an audience. Medium could then still recommend articles they like but I'd rather see ones that people "like me" read and enjoyed. I'd sign up for a service like this so please take my money.

http://imgur.com/gallery/h3tN3

Instead of a feed of stories (recommended by people you follow) you get them in a grid layout.

Worth $5? Hell no. If I was paying for design, I'd pay it to the folks at theoutline.com (nicest media site by miles and miles). However, there are great writers on Medium and they deserve to be supported. Take my money.

Also, as an aside, they really should let people change the look of the posts beyond the header image. Content tends to look too much alike and while Medium's design is pretty nice, I'm sure there are content creators that would like to change how their posts look beyond the basic controls.

I like the platform and how dynamic it is in a multimedia sense, yet the 'anchor' is still the written word.

This is a new time for media enterprises. Even the NYT is getting a refresh - according to Taibbi at Rolling Stone, 132,000 subscriptions in the first 18 days following the election.

There is a craving for better signal-to-noise voices. The pendulum has swung - obviously - in an extremist direction, and it will take someone of incredible merit and stature to rise above and simply, deftly, and beautifully dispatch with such rhetoric on a daily basis.

I'm pretty optimistic in Medium's chances to cultivate a new arena. Heck, even BuzzFeed is getting into the serious journalism arena.

The advertising part of the model may have been removed, but I think there's still value in enabling publishers with tools to sell their content directly to readers.

If it's based on portion of page views, we're back to encouraging clickbait--but now we're paying for it!

I'd pay the $5/month if they could convince me they've solved this problem. But to me it sounds like they'll have some "staff curation"--which other commenters have pointed out is questionable--and otherwise just be hoping the non-advertiser revenue magically changes things.

I'm not convinced this will work.

I'm not sure this is the right man to lead the "curation" of opinions. Or at least, if he does, he needs to be upfront about his own political leanings.

Social justice warfare and anti-Trumpism may make the world a better place.

But fighting democratic trends by censoring / controlling the opinions of a significant proportion of the population may also inflame rightwing opinions and give Trump semi-legitimacy.

-asking as someone who publishes on Medium for a national sports outlet. This really worries me for that reason, and for the reason that I already find Medium's curation, or the things they tell me I'd be interested in to be extremely boring and not at all worth reading.

"the big difference is that it’s not an endless feed. Instead, it’s a finite digest of stories, organized into sections, and updated three times a day. Topics are different from tags because they’re curated by experts in their fields and they bring the top stories directly to your homepage."

"We will be routing 100% of the revenue from founding members (those who sign up in the first few months) to writers and independent publishers who have important work to do."

How much of the revenue will be paid out to writers and publishers in time?

I assume Medium wants to make money from this venture so I'll hazard a guess that the $5 will become $10, and Medium will take 30%.

I got tapped to be Medium's first external editor. I'm going to run a section on personal development: productivity, health, life hacking, maybe some gadgets, plus a few more crazy topics.

Medium's execution idea is to take a subject-matter expert (I run Coach.me) and give that expert a modest editorial budget and a lot of freedom. Literally, Ev's directions were:

"I'm interested in any topic you're interested in that you think matters to smart people."

I think that model of smart, subject matter experts filling editorial roles can actually work really well to produce high-quality media. The heyday of O'Reilly books (when all programmers had O'Reilly books on their desks) mostly ran this way. The main editors were also great coders. The O'Reilly conferences still run this way.

In my case, having a budget has been an amazing switch from the editorial I had been doing. It took me about three days to start sending out hyperbolic statements like:

"There hasn’t been a personal development publication that mattered since Gina Trapani left Life Hacker in 2009. This could be the next one."

Experiencing the switch really highlighted for me what's wrong with the status quo.

In personal development, blogging has been completely corrupted by content marketing. Literally a content marketing company, Buffer, came in and owned productivity blogging for awhile. Look at the top productivity stories on Medium and you'll find most of the authors are marketers rather than academics or coaches.

So what you see in personal development content is articles that have been fully optimized for virality. The headline is everything. I run a Medium publication that is a group blog for our coaches (Better Humans) and we saw a 5X change in traffic after we asked writers to run their headline through an online headline scoring tool.

But... having content dominated by content marketers feels like empty calories pretty quickly. Not to be too prickly--but a content marketer doesn't have any experience with how the reader is going to implement the advice. That makes for functionally weak articles. Either the reader attempts nothing or attempts something and gives up in frustration.

A personal development article that works is actually really hard to write. Tim Ferriss does this exceptionally well. And if you deconstruct one of his posts you'll find a lot of parts to it. You can't write a short article if you actually care about changing people's lives. I've been on the receiving end of a Tim Ferriss article and those users come in hyped up to the point where they spike retention.

Maybe the current crop of content marketers don't care about impact. Or they just see themselves as the front of the funnel.

Well, here's the switch with content in a membership model. Our content is the end of the funnel. Medium already has the reader's money. So we're going to write completely different articles than anyone else because our article is the product. It's supposed to change your life on its own.

These high quality articles take time to write. The people who know how to write them are busy. In other words, I think really great content for this particular niche really can't exist in any other format. Not sure I completely made the case for that, but it's definitely what I'm feeling after a few days.

I haven't thought too hard about what other niches get transformed in a good way if you put them behind membership. I know people are mentioning news. That experience seems lame to me too. But I do pay for ESPN's Insider. That's just because I'm a basketball junkie. I used to have a subscription for Rails tutorials. I would pay for insider-y stuff--if I love your book and you have a paywall for your daily blog then I'll pay. Mostly, I think this just comes down to any other pay product: if the content is the type of content I love and is trustworthy and is higher quality than I can get anywhere... of course I'd pay for that.

This "pivot" is just about Medium being a better magazine editor than the current magazines.

>Media is broken. And we need to fix it.

Medium is broken and needs fixing.

Medium has no journalism and no good writing. It only has content. Content Marketing. Either for companies or for individuals.

Subscriptions are a way of fixing this - but get off your high horse first and get introspective. Medium is worse than BuzzFeed and Business Insider as it stands.