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Comment by aoleinik | Hacker News Reader

I write on medium [1] and I don’t think switching to a stand alone website would be good for me at all.

Medium has “publications” where my work gets sent out to hundreds of readers that are reading about a topic, not necessarily from me - I’m not notable at all in the field so I’d have a rather hard time getting people to subscribe to __me__.

If I were to make my own website, I’d lose a ton of discoverability.

Plus, the monetization on medium is fantastic. Nowhere else would I get that return per view - I’m currently averaging around 25k views a month with a $500 return.

I do have my gripes with the platform, but in my case, Medium is the worst platform for writing besides all the rest. [1] https://anth-oleinik.medium.com/

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For what it's worth, you're currently losing my discoverability by using a platform that I don't. Me (and many, many other people) will get redirected to your site, see a big intrusive banner on our screen, and leave. It doesn't matter if you were about to disclose the panacea or secrets to life, there's simply no writing on Medium that's worth the royal asspain of stepping through your digital metal detector.

You're increasing the amount of complexity in your reader's stack to reduce the complexity of your stack. Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.

Yes, they're losing yours, but that's a small cost to pay vs NO ONE discovering their stuff.

Basically what this comes down to is that there's a market for something like Medium's earlier days, back when it was decent. Someone just needs to figure out a better way to monetize it, while still having the mind share Medium used to have.

Ah yes the monetisation. That's always been a problem on the internet.

Yes you can reach millions of people but not earn a single €. Many such cases! Newspapers almost went broke because of the digital future until they decided to do something completely anti web 2.0: PAYWALL IT. And it worked newspapers were saved.

Did it work though? I've never actually signed up to a paper like that.

I've had a subscription to the guardian online but they didn't have a paywall. Especially because of that I got to know the content they brought better. If they'd had a paywall I'd have just closed the tab after the first three articles and never have gotten to the point of thinking "hey this is really a site that I identify with".

However when the whole Brexit thing started it became too big a topic and it became annoying as I'm not UK based so I stopped renewing. Before that time they had much deeper coverage of topics I was interested in

This is the main problem today. Good journalism costs money, and that money can come from ads, but that's usually not enough to pay the freight. Hence paywalls.

Or... it can be free.

But it also costs money to run a site. Especially if you're serving up millions of pages of content and images.

So... someone is paying the bills. The question is who, and why?

Bottom line is that "free" news either comes from someone selling you and your personal information, or it comes from someone with an agenda.

And that's the problem I spoke of earlier. You're either getting information from a recommendation engine designed to promote "engagement" and as such tends towards serving up controversy... or you're getting your information from someone with a specific agenda... which means they're feeding you what they want you to think.

I agree, but a paywall is not the answer IMO.

I'm not going to sign up to a site to read only a few random articles. And the number of free ones they usually offer is way too low to really get a feel for what the site offers. Most sites I visit already present a paywall when I click through a few links from hacker news or reddit. This way I don't really feel any engagement with the site and I'm not tempted to ever sign up for it.

The Guardian didn't have a paywall at that time, but the high quality of their articles and the strength of reporting on topics that interest me (privacy in particular) convinced me to take out a subscription. I wouldn't have experienced that quality if they had a paywall, they'd just have pissed me off after the first few and I'd never have come back. A newspaper is its own advertisement but if you can't read it you won't be swayed.

So what is the answer? I think added value. Extra deep content you can click through on or something, PDFs, things like that. It's a touch premise though, if you offer too much for free most people aren't going to pay for it. But put too many things behind a paywall and you'll be alienating potential customers.

Unfortunately the Guardian kind of lost its appeal as an EU-wide privacy-centric paper for me, as Brexit made it turn its focus inward just like the rest of Britain did. As I have no ties with the UK it lost its relevance to me.

I'm still looking for something that can fill that role now. EU-focused, privacy-first, progressive. I subscribed to Ars for a while too but I found it too 'popular'/'light' on the tech side and too US-centric (not a bad thing, just not my interest). If anyone else has a suggestion I'd appreciate it :)

Isn't the big banner only if the author opted into paid reads?

> Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.

I think you should be the one conscious that you're a small minority and not representing "most people" at all.

Your observation is worth nothing because you also aren’t reading his personal blog, or wherever he would publish instead. You don’t even try to suggest other places you’d happily read.

Except he is reading HN which will link to personal blogs.

I am not saying write good context and they will find you, but Medium isn’t that great. Only ~9% of the writers made over $100 in a month, and the top earner fluctuates between 20 and 30k/month. You basically get a handful of people making a living and most people getting little more than free hosting.

How can he lose your discoverability when he never had it? Sure, you won’t read his blog now, but you had no way of discovering it before.

You can’t lose something you didn’t have.

TIL there's no way of discovering content outside of Medium.

We are literally on a forum where they could have discovered OP's blog before, now, or after.

Content can be discovered using a search engine or through a link from another website.

If the authors of other websites link to it. But how do they discover it?

Word of mouth. If your writing is good, it spreads itself.

Someone has to discover it before it can spread by word of mouth.

Speaking of own sites, but did you ever find out what is going on with effbot.org? Somewhat off topic, but I just found your older post & HN has disabled new comments there… I’ve referred to that Tkinter guide so many times. Sad to see it down.

If they're clicking on a link, discoverability is done. It's been discovered.

Clicking on a link from where? Sure, if you have popular places linking to you, you don’t need medium’s discovery

Who cares? Clicking on a link was the premise, we just assume it to be true and move on.

If you have to tell people out loud “you’re losing my business!” it usually means they didn’t even notice when they did.

Apparently adding this hoop is filtering for a lot more readers who are willing to pay, though. You're probably not willing to pay. I'm not either. From a financial point of view, both of our opinions on the Medium paywall are worth absolutely nothing.

There are other ways to make money on the internet, personally I like the "post shit everywhere for free, have a Patreon" model, which is giving me similar numbers of around $1k/mo for not much energy put into promotion, with a little bit more every month as my patrons grow. But some people like putting up paywalls, and it's their choice to do that with whatever they're creating.

Does medium force you to be exclusive? Else why not do both, it takes a fre hours to set up and afterward 5min per post to post it nicely on both medium and your own site. In return you can have your own newsletter signups, freely link to ehatever you want, ... and have some independence if medium ever decides they don't like you (or you decide you don't like them).

I’m not a fan of Medium but I do admit that those are compelling arguments.

I'm with aoleinik. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I had a stand-alone blog that--to put it bluntly--no one visited.

Today I put the same type of content on Medium and get thousands of readers on almost each and every article. So much, in fact, that I've consistently been in the top 1,000 creators on Medium several months running.

Yes, I understand that I'm simply part of their platform. but that's the same for anyone who attempts to create monetized content on Medium, YouTube, Twitch, or any of the many other platforms that pay creators for content.

As far as I can tell, articles and sites like the one above exist because some people simply believe that they should never have to pay for content, and that everything should be free.

Fair enough. And, that being the case, those people are never going to see my work. Also fair.

But Medium drives enough people to my content to make the exchange work for me. Plus it provides enough incentive to get me off my butt and create things that I probably won't have created otherwise.

If anyone who reads this doesn't like Medium. Fine. If you want to go elsewhere... also fine.

But thus far, the value proposition works for me, and it apparently also works for all of the people who read my articles and stories and tutorials each and every day.

To them, thanks.

Do you give up rights to your work by posting on Medium?

Also, do you have a link to your work?

No you don't give up rights. You own everything you write and publish. Medium has a setting where you can download all of your files at once as HTML files and there are tools for converting those html files into markdown.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/mediumexporter

Wow, that’s a significant return. I used to have a blog in which I wrote technical content, and the traffic was considerably more than 25,000 per month. I only spent money on that, never made a cent.

It did help me get jobs, but I can’t say with certainty that it got me better jobs than I would have without it. I’ve done far better since without a blog attached to my name.

Anyway, that’s a lot of money to make off of something I associated with costing money.

Sounds like someone should create a discoverability and curation service for independent blogs, independently of the hosting platform.

And we shall call it:

Real

Simple

Syndication

RSS is as you mentioned, syndication. Not discovery.

I guess apps like feedly have RSS recommendations, but that's not the same thing.

RSS made building discovery apps extremely easy. Today you can’t aggregate content at all most of the time unless you are the platform.

RSS was only part of the solution, the other half... was Google Reader: the homepage's "Suggested" section learned what you were starring/following and provided new content. I found tons of new stuff to read with that.

It was called Technorati.

Good ole days

$20 CPM is indeed very high. Just a cursory look at your blog I think 25k page views/mo is actually pretty low given the number of likes/user interactions you get on your posts and how frequently you post. I don't know how Medium is counting a view but usually 3 views translate to a unique user for blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if you counted your views with something like Google Analytics and saw numbers 10x more views than what Medium is reporting. If true then even a $10 CPM would put you in $2,500/mo range.

$20 CPM is very high for advertising, but it's not all that high for a paywall that is working well, no?

How do you get your posts into publications?

Step 1: put them behind Medium's paywall.

Step 2: I don't know what Step 2 is because I'm unwilling to do Step 1.

There are content curators for the publications - essentially, you just submit them and if your article is good enough they’ll publish it.

You work for medium and you only care about yourself, not about your readership if you have any

> I don’t think switching to a stand alone website would be good for me

> you only care about yourself, not about your readership if you have any

Well, that’s how capitalism is supposed to work innit? :) Producers care about themselves and consumers choose, competition ensues, the producers are therefore forced to conform to the consumers’ preferences.

What I mean is “you only care about yourself”, in a business setting, is not an accusation by itself, however unvirtuous it sounds. The opposite of “capitalism” in the first sentence is not “social democracy” or “welfare state”, it’s “planned economy”, and I’d say that every ethical judgment that moves us towards that has to go.

Except this works only when there’s (a lot of) competition, which is exactly what platforms attempt to exploit: you (a producer) move according to your best interest at each point, like everyone else, only to find yourself in a mono- (or oligo-) psony market where you have to sell through the platform(s) or perish, and now the platform(s) can enforce whatever they wish on you. The consumers aren’t feeling that spiffy, either. The laws of competition no longer apply.

(Huh, is moving to a platform essentially a prisoner’s dilemma with the (defect,defect) state obscured by marketing?)

"I don't agree with you, therefore you're a greedy jerk" why didn't you just come out and say what you meant.

> If I were to make my own website, I’d lose a ton of discoverability.

This is why I still (occasionally) write on Medium.

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