I don't think that you can't build a subscription business at Medium. What I told the team internally is that we had a Goldilocks problem where one thing we tried was wrong in one direction and what we're doing now is problematic in a different direction.
But I've been publishing on Medium since the beginning and have a pretty good sense of the intersection of quality and Medium's model. What I'm saying is keep an open mind. We grew a pretty large subscription already with a lot still that we can do to make it much higher quality.
I do not want to monetize my writings anymore, but there was one day, when I did.
But your behavior made that impossible. You said once Stripe start working in India, you'd start MPP in India, then they started in Beta. Then you said when Stripe comes out of Beta, you will have MPP in India.
Then when Stripe started full-fledged service in India, you stopped mentioning India.
This behavior really frustrated me and made me stopped considering Medium seriously for anything.
I made good money on Quora in the past. They could send money to India- no problem, but not you guys.
I don't want money for my writings now. I want all of them to be free. But I am angry at Medium, and would never be returning.
I've been using Medium as a reader, writer, and subscriber for some years. And nowadays I am unconsciously not using Medium as much in profit of Substack and Ghost. My main draw to Medium as a writer was to reach lot of people. A random paywall means less reach. Not sure if max reach and paywall are reconcilable and solvable.
'Cuz, here, look at it:
There's so much junk in the way of the content. It feels like Medium doesn't respect the text or the act of reading. Night and day compared to Substack.
If I'm in any way typical, you've got a lot of work to do to overcome the negative associations of the brand.
I'll have to dig up my analysis I did last year (using BigQuery HN data), but on HN there are more Medium links than ever, but they tend not to get voted on at the same rate as older stories which tells me at least for the HN crowd it isn't worth clicking on them.
1) It is too much work: In world of static site publishing and easy cloud hosting it is not too much work for technically competent person to host their own content if they have something worthwhile to say.
2) Not our core competency: Many companies or teams who say this sounds to me management style BS. If hosting few articles in your domain is beyond their competency then I can't really trust whatever cloud, big data, distributed, serverless computing they are talking about.
You can host a WordPress site on blog.yourcompany.com for an amount that rounds to $0, and it will probably satisfy most people who dislike Medium and other aggregators.
Or you can roll your own of course, but the extra geek cred you will get for it is minimal. Not saying don’t do it, I’ve done it more than once, but do it for the doing.
Ultimately I think lowering the barrier for publishing is a good thing, but that comes with an inherent cost on quality and the incentives just aren't there for businesses / brands to solve this. The backstop for me is personal reputation. Individuals can maintain integrity and principles, businesses cannot (except as a function of stable individual leadership). Therefore, I believe platforms which orient towards scalability and anonymous algorithms will be a race to the bottom (eg. Medium, TikTok), and platforms which orient around the individual (eg. Substack) will at least have a chance at representing quality (monetization, scalability, VC-pressure concerns notwithstanding).
Medium significantly improves your reach and access to statistics to understand readers better. Until Medium came around I had clue I could ever make a living as writer.
A lot of us use Medium because it has solved a problem long plaguing the internet: How do you get paid for creating content?
I know myself that so don’t want to sign up to one dozen places for subscription. That would be the problem hosting your own site. Few people want to have 10 different subscriptions. With medium one subscription gives access to a lot of writers.
I am hopeful that /u/tonystubblebine will reply to your comment, and I'm genuinely hopeful and interested in his answer because it essentially determines whether I'll open myself back up to reading and publishing on Medium.
This annoys me about all sites, but I think it feels worse on Medium because I remember a time when I thought Medium was decent. The design itself still looks good, and that, too might be why the bank feels worse.
Yep. Damaged goods. Sorry Tony. If a medium article comes up as a link or a part of my search, that's a thing I won't be clicking.
There's a lot of junk in the content too. In the software topic, I have read some articles that had interesting code by what sounded like entry-level to mid-level software engineers, and it was helpful for me when I was grasping with similar problems. But most of the senior-level author articles that are more about concepts, high-level project or organization problems and similar, most of the interesting stuff was outside of it. On medium I rarely see articles like that, what I see most are articles that try to be about that, but read like written by a non-senior author, and is sometimes buzzwordy or has no information I can extract beyond self promotion of the author.
While the posting experience is nice. Content discovery is terrible. Content monetization is even worse. I can't justify researching a post for hours for no reads and no money.
1) Allow creators to make content (Medium does great at this, Ev’s eye for product was key here, but always room to improve)
2) Match that content with the correct/largest possible audience, like how twitter has hashtags/trending, FB has the friend graph, and ultimately Tik Tok has the algorithm (Medium is awful at this and if I were you, I’d focus immediately on solving this).
Fight the good fight I guess.
Somewhere I feel that when an author link to an article, that link is an invitation to consume the linked text. It just feels uncivilised to put out links and then not deliver on it.
That said, I was at one time a subscriber of LWN. The model there was that articles were subscriber only the first week, and then public after that. _Unless_ a subscriber decided to provide a link, then the article was also available for anyone following that link.
Perhaps thats a model that could work for Medium? If I ever get an rss-reader up, and start following sources again I could perhaps see my self pay a subscription for “early access” feeds (to support some pore journalist doing actual reporting if nothing else)
In particular for written content, the threshold for funding is low and the bar for execution is as well, which skirts a lot of the issues the actual Kickstarter has.
And if funding is anonymous, there isn't any direct issue with undue influence from benefactors.
There's a number of written pieces I'd happily pay to help bring into existence. And a number of other pitches that even if I wouldn't be interested in funding, I'd be interested in creating an account to vote up to increase visibility to those that would, and in both cases being notified when that content finally exists.
But I have very little interest in simply funding an author in general, or paying to access content when summaries of anything important will exist elsewhere, or even in wasting my time with free material that's over engineered towards clickbait and maximizing my scrolling to serve the most ads.
In particular, I'd love to fund a return of actual investigative journalism on topics I'd value.
We saw the short tail of this in action with Sanderson on the actual Kickstarter, but I definitely think there's a long tail model viability on a specialized platform for written content.
In any case, good luck with the new role.
Instead of a freelance writer pitching a story to an editor of the NYT, throw it up on a site where the pitches can be seen and funded directly by their potential audience.
If the NYT was going to pay a few hundred dollars for the article, that's a very low threshold for funding.
Obviously writers with a portfolio of past work will have an advantage in that system, but even fresh talent could build up a portfolio with interesting pitches at low funding goals.
A lot of content curation is built around a paradigm where the editors speculate about what their audience actually wants, and that's not always very accurate.
I recall a friend who wrote about sexual politics for major publications who had a hard time getting a pitch for a story on child free attitudes sold to the editor, and yet that piece ended up the most read and shared for the year.
Remove the middleman and allow writers to sell the pitch directly to the audience - who if they care about it enough will fund it and read it when finished. And then don't care about trying to control or hinder further distribution or handicapping the piece/headline to optimize clicks or ads.
Monetize the creation and not the distribution.
It’s full of banners, popups and annoyances that is completely opposite of what you’d want in a site where you focus and learn something
These are also features of Medium, maybe most blogs. Being discerning is also a required feature of the internet, regardless what one might dream of, imo.
Do you think substack has some metric on "unsubstantiated opinions" that they're trying to maximize? Or have you just noticed more content that you disagree with there?
Conversely, technical content doesn't do as well on Substack.
In particular re Medium:
> On the backend, the way [Medium's] partner program works is that users’ membership fees are allocated proportionally to the writer based on how many articles the user read. Fine. Also there is something about clapping. I guess if I really like a writer I could make sure to read a lot of their articles so they can get some of that membership fee. But, as a consumer, I: a. can’t subscribe directly to the writer, and b. can’t signal that I value their content at more than $5 per month. No amount of claps can make up for that!
Writers and readers both don't get the right amount of value from their framework.
The Substack model is that you provide both content and audience, and they provide hosting and monetization tools. They're a service provider where only the author is their customer, and so they're able to focus exclusively on what the authors need.
This doesn't happen in practice. Like most marketplaces they have an incentive to market things that are popular or appear to be trending. That means in order for Medium to promote your article you need to do the marketing with your own audience or outlets to get eyeballs on the article and after Medium flags your article as popular it might get promoted.
This is a really big concept because it means if you're just starting off with no audience you might as well grow your own audience on your platform because most marketplaces like Medium (and others) aren't heavily promoting folks with no prior audience.
I remember putting some of my blog posts on Medium and setting the canonical URL back to my site. Out of the hundreds of thousands of visits my personal blog got I only had a few hundred total hits on Medium. That's because I didn't promote and drive my own traffic to Medium and in turn they didn't promote me.
That's not something I saw when I used Medium in 2018ish for some of my posts.
I know there was a partner program but that wasn't paying to get traffic to your posts. That was a mechanism to get paid based on how much engagement you had on your Medium articles. It's just another incentive to get you to drive your own traffic and audience to Medium to drive up Medium engagement. Basically helping Medium grow their business.
If you wanted to pay money to promote your content you can do that without Medium. You can buy ads on Google and other outlets then run ads to your blog posts. I don't do that personally but it's an option.
This resulted in being able to build an audience that would read my work irrespective of whether I published with a publication.
That suggests that Medium should be more reader-friendly than Substack, but it seems the opposite is true. I suspect that even when readers are nominally customers on Medium, they are really still just the product (in the sense of “if it’s free, you’re the product” — except it’s not free here).
When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.
FWIW I don't like medium because it is unpredictably paywalled.
Its not available on the chrome store because of manifest V2, there is privacy redirect but its abandoned and doesn't support scribe.
“Medium.com” nowadays is a sign of low quality and I personally started skipping articles because of that alone.
With Substack, I'm prompted to subscribe directly to newsletters from individual authors.
None of the authors I follow on Twitter tell me to subscribe to Mediums. A bunch of them point me towards their Substacks.
You get a lot more interesting writers on board than Medium in that case. People who stick to the safe areas of thought don't make history (for good or ill).
Substack has to pay the "I'm being cancelled" blowhards huge sums to get them on the platform to begin with. They earn nothing from eyeball traffic; people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage. And even if they did, Substack would earn a tiny pittance from their fraction of subscription fees from that demographic.
So in those cases, Substack provided financing and made money on it in the end. I don't know if that's true on average, though.
The content creator doesn't fully trust the new publisher/platform, so they need upfront monetary assurance beyond a normal advance/royalty type deal, in case the platform fails. Likewise the platform values exclusives from big names that will drive demand for the platform. So the platform gives up potential upside to secure the exclusivity rights and the content creators get a premium.
I imagine there must be some authors out there who didn't mmet Substack's expectations, but they're apparently few and far between.
> people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage
Some prominent Substacks have tens of thousands of paying subscribers. Glenn Greenwald is apparently clearing (after Substack's fees), something like $100k USD/month. Matt Taibbi has even more paying subscribers, so will make even more; Andrew Sullivan is close behind. Last year Substack announced they had over 1 million paying subscribers (generally around $5-10/month), and the top 10 newsletters were at that point generating over $20m in revenue/year (ie, averaging over 2m each).
As it turns out, a non-trivial amount of people are willing to pay for writing, whatever the reason is.
Beyond that, Substack is currently positioning themselves as a platform/tool for content creators to create their own brand and market to their own audience. If you aren't paying attention, you might not even notice that your favourite author was on Substack; they're functionally a spiritual descendent of the independent blogs of old (who might be running on MT or Wordpress or whatever, but weren't a "Wordpress blog by Joe Smith", but "Joe Smith's blog" (which happens to be on Wordpress).
Medium has been positioning themselves as a content brand in their own right for some time; they have been undergoing relentless business model churn, but at various times they've had editorial teams, they've commissioned work, they've had writers on payroll, and they've had verticals or "editorial teams" or whatever such as OneZero, Forge, Marker, and Elemental. Those last I think were launched in 2019 and killed off in 2021; but functioned like magazines published by Medium with editors and staff writers. I'm not quite sure what todays strategy is, but it seems to still be focused on the publisher/magazine model where the brand is "Medium" and the author just gets a byline.
You can see this approach in terms of features like theming, URL structures, support for custom domains, etc. (Eg, Substack supports custom domains; Medium recently ended their support.)
I think the fact that YT hosts video makes it quite a different beast from Medium. Self hosting video is still quite difficult, and expensive. Hosting text is much cheaper and simpler.
This fact changes the game quite a bit.
They wish! Medium is Vimeo.