Medium asks $5 a month for nothing
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
But even if you don't really care about Medium, it's actually a very strong piece otherwise, because it presents a fairly comprehensive list of the various business models that online publishers have tried over the years, along with data about how successful those strategies have been.
I'm a former journalist who had to leave the industry not because I didn't care for journalism anymore, but because newspapers lost their business model, and the industry remains a shadow of its former self.
Among the business models the article describes:
- Ad-funded. When it doesn't work well: General interest news orgs, such as your daily metro newspaper. The bulk of their ad revenue continues to come from print advertising, and digital advertising has little chance of every pulling in comparable revenue. When it works well: "We cover a specific niche; we dig in a little deeper; we tend to know what we're talking about; we're independently owned and thus have no corporate investors to please."
- Subscription. When it doesn't work well: Historically, people have been reluctant to pay for what they thought they could get for free. When it does work well: "Big respected names with huge resources that have hit on a specific model: offer a few free articles a month and then prompt for subscription. It has finally started working after a decade of hard times. In part thanks to the election of Donald Trump, these news organizations have seen their subscriber levels jump. ... it seems that, psychologically, people are getting used to the idea again of paying for content. It's like a switch. And once you pay for Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime, it seems perfectly reasonable to pay for quality news."
- Guilt. When it doesn't work well: The Guardian has tried a variation of this -- "If you use it, if you like it, then why not pay for it? It's only fair." -- and the results have been terrible. When it does work well: Wikipedia's donation drives tend to pull in a ton of cash, but it's a nonprofit.
- Advertorials. When it doesn't work well: In Business Insider's case, "you literally sell yourself to companies. We predict this will end in misery sooner rather than later." When it does work well: Hmm, I don't think it ever does.
And then there are the various compensation models for the content producers:
- Pay professional journalists a decent salary, and don't hinge their pay on page views. It's the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for: Quality, in-depth journalism.
- Pay professional journalists (or unprofessional bloggers) according to their number of page views. This tends to lead to "junk journalism that a hit-based reward model encourages."
- Don't pay your bloggers at all. It's the least expensive option, but again, you get what you pay for.
It's a vicious cycle that is coupled with many people not having money to spend on 'premium news' when there is a global existential crisis and extinction event underway.
I can read an entire Business Insider article without turning off AdBlocker. Why should I pay for their broken 'business model'? Their content is not worth paying for because it is usually derivative and their entire strategy is based on clickbait.
How do you think media will evolve over the next few years?
https://contently.com/strategist/2016/05/23/dont-make-a-comm...
Whenever people ask me how I got into the technology industry (as a non-CS person), my short answer is something like this: when I saw what the Internet was doing to print media, I knew I had to learn how to code. Which led to having to learn how to design (CSS & JS). Which led to having to learn how to create servers for hosting and zero-downtime deploy. And also needing to understand machine capabilities and OSes and network loads and... etc.
Journalism was what I loved in middle and high school: darkroom photography and developing pictures from literal film in stop bath. Cropping shots with razor blades before gluing them on mockups. Soliciting local businesses for ads sold by the square inch. Writing and editing and editing and editing because hey... once that hits the press there is no edit button.
The process of traditional journalism is kind of dead, yes; though I don't think the industry itself has lost its business model... more like it fractured in a way that made national and world news dissemination way more powerful than the local yokel beat. That was what initially happened, anyway: small newspapers simply could not compete, and those that could were slurped up by massive parent companies that may or may not be entirely neutral or unbiased, politically, due to their size.
However, I think the tides are starting to shift and the trend is back toward localization. My initial grand design plan for Ecosteader, for example, was big and national.. like a magazine. I realized that the kind of advertising I'd need to be able to sell in this niche would actually do best locally. And indeed, this is why I keep the site live (despite the fact that I have sold only one book and received zero dollars from Adsense). I am pretty sure that going forward the next "big" disruptive thing in will be in hyper-localization ... ecological and efficient when it comes to physical goods and labor.
Anyway... slight digression, but I think it's indicative of what matters WRT to what people are willing to pay for when it comes to advertising delivered alongside content. Advertising works when people are looking for specific content relevant to them and they notice a good deal or a sale or a new store opening or something interesting about a place they see IRL.
This is getting too long. I will stop now.
The Cocainenomics article by the WSJ sponsored by Netflix is a great example. Affiliate sites like The Wire Cutter. Also pretty much every ad in popular podcasts that have hosts talk about companies they use, etc.
What I fail to understand is how something like Medium turns into a bloated ~150 person company that's burning VC cash like crazy with no clear path towards becoming an actual business that makes decent revenue, let alone profit. Whether it's a bubble or not is semantics but it's these sorts of 'companies' that the market needs to flush out of the ecosystem ASAP.
They need 1.4% of readers to subscribe
They charge 1/3 what the NYTimes does. The NYTimes company has +$1bn revenues.
They can probably get 1.4% of readers to subscribe. They could also charge subscriptions for blogger tools. They could have tiered subscriptions ($5 is the lowest guardian membership, and it looks like you get little for it). They have only just started offering subscriptions so I imagine what you get for $5 will only grow.
150 people really isn't bloat. Stack overflow has 250 employees and I bet you never paid them a penny. SO have VC funding to series D and they have fewer users and readers than Medium.
It seems that Medium has a viable business model: ads and subscriptions. Same as any other media business.
Medium is a bunch of blogs.
And the viable business model you mention, ads&subscriptions is excluded by the fact medium has said they will not use ads. Hence, they have no business model.
Ads and subscriptions are mutually exclusive.
Medium is just another place for people too lazy to setup a blog to post their crap. Most of the content stinks and is just self-promoting vanity posting. People won't pay for that. They could throw some ads up there and make a few bucks but again that's how a 5 person company (which Medium should be) is viable and makes people some money... not the bloated entity they are now.
If the money went to these authors, it might be worthwhile to subscribe.
But if the money just goes to the blog platform du jour, no.
Yet, if at least 1.4% of their 60m readers disagree with you then it can be a sustainable business.
I'm not sure I understand why you care that they have 150 employees. Both Medium and Stack Overflow think at least 150 people is needed to monetize their sites, yet you only dislike one of those businesses.
Medium provides me with things I could never achieve on my own personal website. It saves me a lot of DevOps time which I can focus on programming and actual writing. It provides me with an awesome uptime - I alone can't ever beat a flock of engineers on-call. I get a social network of readers who recommend my posts. Publications provide me with an easy way to get bigger number of readers. It's design and technical merits are outcome of years of iteration, time I would have to spend to reinvent the wheel.
It's not about being lazy, it's about having the time to actually provide good content.
Or they could start charging a reasonable yearly fee for custom domains. Our tech blog is hosted on medium, we have a custom domain (https://smarketshq.com/) and I'm pretty sure we wouldn't mind a couple of hundred a year for the reasonably good user experience.
Writing with their tools is not bad (although I would like the feature to automatically readjust paragraphs when pasting short plaintext lines), and submitting to a publication is easy. Turning low-friction workflow into a business case shouldn't be that much of an outlier.
This is one of the secrets of how to make money on media IMO you need very little overhead.
Maria Popova from https://www.brainpickings.org/ is making more than a $1M a year with her model.
The search for a large scale business model in media is never going to turn anything out, its not the content thats valuable but distribution.
So, BuzzFeed?
I will add that much of the "fake news" controversy is driven by old, high-quality media losing its audience/distribution to new, low-quality media. It's a futile attack though, because high-quality creators cannot grow their audience as fast as new media can make better quality content.
Inaccurate. Good content can and will self distribute.
You're on the internet, your content is instantly automatically available to 1 billion people.
Search engine are incredibly good at discovering niche/targeted content, a good article will be top page in a few weeks even if you have zero reader (well, until then).
And good articles can and will be tweeted, HN, reddited to many thousands of people.
Maybe I should write a medium blog post about that :D
> Inaccurate. Good content can and will self distribute.
And follow it up with
> You're on the internet
My experience on the internet is much different than yours.
Thats why you feed is filled with clickbait titles and "10 things to X" or fake news for that matter (the real fake news not the overhyped use of it today)
They actually are made to make money they are just not good content.
I have been involved in two actual paper newspapers who both failed in the zeros. I have seen an uncountable number of attempts to make money by providing quality journalism.
The reality is that most people don't care about "quality" journalism. It its' not valuable enough to establish an industry.
I'm surprised anyone would say this, given the realities of the media landscape. It's very, very, rare for 'good' content to get automatic distribution. Some viral content does get high exposure, but most content, especially barely-insightful commentary that is produced on Medium has very little mass appeal. When you consider that the average RPM (revenue per thousand page views) is around $1.50 or less then even an article with ten thousand views can only make $15, which is barely worth writing it.
It's also extremely difficult to rank content using search engines, as anyone who knows about SEO will testify. The market is very crowded and big content brands dominate the top positions. In short, content on the web is a commodity.
However, it's important to note that search engines are not the only form of distribution. There are many opportunities to grow an audience in new media that is coming up. For example a new provider of VR content can grow quickly, even if their content is crappy, because the distribution channel (VR hardware) is growing.
My experience contradicts this. Probably because we are talking about different things.
If you look for "hotels in new york" or "how to not get fat?" or something about trump. It is indeed crowded, the search engines are already filled with "relevant" results and you cannot compete with that.
yet for every of this non sense, there are other ten expressions who are not crowded and it's very easy to rank on top.
The first means that you cannot create another useless stupid news site filled with non news and rank anywhere significantly on these topics.
The latter one means you can write about targeted topics and rank on the first page very easily on them.
That's like saying that sales volume is king. If you're pushing a huge amount of product relative to competitors, you're probably doing fairly well for yourself. It's a tautological assertion.
Content is king. What you subjectively deride as "crap content", and is more commonly known as "clickbait", is actually fairly high quality content, when quality means "engineered for the maximum marketability towards the largest possible audience" rather than intellectual or insightful or inherently evident of intense, original journalistic effort. Remember that taste is highly subjective and it's quite possible for there to be a very large market with tastes you disagree with.
The New York Times is successful because it employs some of the best editors in the business and unifies their curation behind the NYT brand. There is quite a large market that's willing to pay top dollar for the tastes of the NYT editors/curators. If anything, the NYT's continued success is proof that there is still a market for that kind of content. What Medium is really trying to do is to scale the NYT. Which is either a farce on its face, or going to be utterly fascinating.
I've also sometimes paid for images for my articles. If Medium made is super easy (and cheap) to find and buy images for an article, I'd use it.
Have no idea if these revenue streams could scale to the degree Medium needs, though.
Like https://500px.com/ ?
The last few years have re-arranged my expectations. If you had told me an instant messaging platform like What's App would get acquired for billions I would have laughed. ICQ, AOL Messenger MSN Messenger, etc. had already come and gone. If you had told me one of the hottest IPOs in 2017 would be based on a photo-sharing app, one that doesn't even persist photos for very log, I would have laughed. If someone had sat me down in 2007 and said Flickr would be overshadowed by SnapChat I don't think I would have believed it.
So yeah, I get that blogs have been done and they mostly faded away to "journalism lite". But I get the feeling we'll see a few more whacks at that piñata before the candy comes out.
Maybe Q&A sites will also make a comeback? Quora and stackexchnage haven't seen the kind of growth that creates industries
(I used to run a post production boutique and learned this the hard way.)
Ev Williams' previous startups (Blogger, Twitter) along with other networks like FB all rely on users producing endless streams of content FOR FREE. This seems to be working when the "content" is 140-char witticisms, cat videos, or various forms of lifestyle/status/virtue signaling. The "content producers" seem to think that the tradeoff is worth it.
The math is very different when it comes to producing thoughtful, long-form, polished content. Ev Williams hoped that he could provide writers with enough incentive to do that sort of difficult work on the Medium platform.
But even assuming that there are enough writers willing produce high-end content gratis, it is still unclear what incentives Medium is offering in exchange for moving your operations into their walled garden. A better <TEXTAREA>, plus some hand-waving about the future, isn't cutting it.
I pay a modest amount to some bloggers directly via Patreon for what I could otherwise get for free. I'm also considering doing the same for The Guardian (though that gets me the removal of ads). It's not out of the question that I would want to do the same for Medium.
I would miss them if they went away or had to change direction to monetise in new ways that reduced their value to me. Is this so bad?
I contribute $54/month on Patreon and $10/month on YouTube Red for creators.
Having said that I think people will struggle with Medium because Patreon is sold on a personal relationship with a given creator and genuinely wanting more from them. Seems like that won't work so well with Medium.
I like Medium though
I would be willing to do the same for high-quality news and opinion. So far, there's far too much chaff in the wheat, and I don't think Medium is the answer. I hope people keep trying, though. Quality journalism is genuinely important.
1. It's a blogging site. A nice one. But that has already been done many times over.
2. If they wanted to replace publishing houses then their first focus should have been to get quality people to write articles AND pay them well.
3. Failing (2) they should have made deals with the news beareaus and newspapers without good online presence to be their article backends.
I don't think creating a nice blogging website is very disruptive in this day and age.
Also, doing what publishing houses used to do but a bit better, and helping failing newspapers host their content are opposite of "disruptive". Those are obvious ideas that someone from that industry would just come up with if they wanted to make a few bucks.
I'm being harsh to make a point that anyone can criticize about someone else's idea easily, but it's a completely different story if you're actually working on it.
In some cases (like medium.com) HN should not only show the URL behind the link (e.g. 'medium.com') but also the user/author (e.g. 'medium.com/@randomuser').
I think the lack of branding on Medium sites has something to do with it. People ended up lumping everything as "Medium articles", from spammy "growth-hacking" articles to well-researched, well written investigative article.
Let me place my bet: Professional look (design, typography) + Medium brand + very little effort to publish + chance to get featured if it attracts clicks.
I still read Medium articles when I came across articles written by people whose work I'm somewhat familiar with though.
This is it for me. If you want to write about tech, or the tech scene, and especially web tech, why can't you just build a site? I've built a few and I don't even do web development for a living so I had to teach myself some stuff.
If you are in tech, you should understand to use the right tool for the job.
You seriously overestimate the capabilities of a raspberry and undestimate the traffic you get.
nginx or varnish can do that (with more or less correct rules).
In practise, I usually disable compression everywhere and let the CDN handles it.
The CDN is configured to compress on the fly and I am very confident that CloudFlare/Akamai are doing that much better than a broken snippet of nginx settings from stack overflow.
I'm not sure if it's still like that, since I'm not using S3 for that right now.
A fluffy 500-word Medium-style article with 1-2MB of JavaScript serving no apparent purpose and 5-10MB of animated GIFs would be another story.
That sets any stupid article at a 500kB bar.
I have no doubt that a HN engineer can publish a single .txt file and force gzip-9 compression, however that's not an acceptable blog by any standard.
For a fully static fully cachable site, it's the bandwidth.
Your home connection cannot serve Gigabytes of data in a timely fashion.
Yes, it could be difficult and a lot of work if you think you need embedded videos that autoplay and follow readers as they scroll down trying to escape that and the pop up pestering them to subscribe.
AWS is madness for personal projects. You don't seem to realize how bad you're about to be bankrupt when an article hit the front HN page. If you have a high quality picture, a gif or a video, it's game over.
I've had a couple of AWS-hosted pages make it to the HN front page.
I don't recall my S3 bill going up to any significant degree, much less bankrupting me.
S3 bandwidth is $0.023/GB at the most expensive tier. It's hard to imagine bankruptcy resulting from any text-oriented site, even if it does hit the HN home page. Maybe if you're hosting hours of HD video or something.
Also, I've never had any trouble using CDNs from an S3 page. Details?
Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver. That's nothing fancy, lots of text, css, logos, headers.
For 100k viewers, that's about 100GB of traffic, or $9 dollars.
How do you bankrupt yourself with your blog from there: By multiplying it.
1) You've got more than this single article => triple it.
2) You've got medias (picture/gif/video) that take 3MB => quadruple it.
3) My traffic stats don't account for bots/crawler => You're at the mercy of them or any dude who "ab -n 1000000 yoursite.com/logo.png"
A bill of hundreds of dollars for a personal blog might not scare a HN silicon valley engineer making $15k a month but that's much more than enough for the rest of the world. Even in western Europe, don't expect the disposable income to be much more than $100 a month.
Correct, my fault there. I was somehow looking at the wrong chart.
"Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver"
I think your estimate of the size of a typical blog post is considerably at variance with the norm. 2-3K would be more like it. Maybe 100K with logo.
The text alone of an article can easily be more than 10kB (that's about 1500 words).
3k might have been correct in 1997 for a single standalone HTML page with only text, very little text actually, and very little formatting.
100k is doable for a very minimal site.
By the way, are we talking about normal blog posts or are we talking about "sites"? What is a "site"? Wikipedia is a site. So is a page with nothing but "Hello, world" on it.
Most articles on the top of Google (outside of news) are much longer than 700 words. See there for some numbers:
https://www.snapagency.com/blog/whatll-be-the-best-length-fo...
While Medium is a very beautiful, well designed site, it doesn't work equally well for every kind of content out there. Technical content with code snippets are one of the least-suitable type of content for Medium.com design.
No matter how much thought is put into the design of the site, Medium's design is still designed to be a one-size-fit-all kind of product, and well, that means no matter how high quality their design is, it is still taking a somewhat "highest-common-denominator" approach to the design.
Platforms have communities that post about certain things, and less about others, and develop a reputation for doing so (and the average quality). If you post on one, your links share the reputation readers attach to it as a baseline, since readers expect it to fit in the pattern of other content they have seen on there.
Interestingly, for me Medium offering custom domains doesn't really impact this, since "people bothering to set up their own domain name" seems to be a group that's less bad in general (and exceptions get mentally tagged as such).
So you seem to be sharing a similar sentiment towards Medium than the rest of the HN readers.
(Even posting tweets to HN gets them double the attention than a random Medium post)
https://medium.com/@hoffa/hacker-news-on-bigquery-now-with-d...
Actually, I think that if you accounted only for the blog on medium.com you are ignoring all the medium blogs on custom domains, which probably have better content than the average.
i suspect probably quite a few more front pages if you include that.
It's good that nowadays there's a social network for anything, that's the beauty of the Internet and I have no problem with that, but haha why would I PAY to read that? It's like paying people to come in front of my house and protest all day every day.
"Wait, you can pay for Medium?"
Just for kicks I spent 5 minutes on their site and could not figure out how to pay..
Unrelated to that, Medium doesn't even work in Safari on the latest macOS, so it's hard to call it anything more than a shitshow.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377/...