
A Shiny Content Farm is Still a Content Farm - Brajeshwar
https://medium.com/on-medium/336300490cbb
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pfortuny
Reading this

 _By furnishing your User Content to Medium, you give Medium a broad license
to use and exploit your User Content as it operates and evolves its business._

Gave me the creeps. What follows, I realised, is even worse.

"Business evolution," there goes a clear-cut concept.

~~~
hablahaha
I wonder if they could've left off the word 'exploit'. I feel like 'use' in
this case essentially means 'potential to exploit'...

~~~
pbhjpbhj
They probably realise that few people will read the user agreement. That they
may as well claim the heavens and the deep-blue sea despite only wanting to
have the entirety of the the landmass, that way no one can successfully sue
them later saying they "exploited" them. Medium can just respond "that's what
you signed up to".

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ChuckMcM
I give medium credit for being up front about their intentions in their
agreement.

The author comes up with what I think of as a very 21st century problem,
building a brand as a writer. When we read about Louis CK doing his own comedy
show and making plenty of money by offering it up DRM free for $5. There is
push back that "well everyone already knows who he is." So clearly the
exposure can be a good thing.

I suspect that writers, like coders or painters or sculpters may find that
much of their early work is given away or benefits a patron rather than the
artist more as part of the 'dues' of becoming 'known.'

I don't agree though with this : _" Gathering an audience when you don’t have
an audience is wicked hard work."_ though. I think of it as just being "work"
and perhaps most importantly it takes "time". Time for people to get around to
reading your stuff, time for people to tell others its worth reading, time for
folks to both find your stuff when they need it and to retain it. It sucks
that if you're the next Hemingway or JK Rowling starting today, you probably
won't be recognized as such for 10 or 15 _years_ from now. That isn't because
of some painful gymnastic maneuver you have to do, it is that information
diffuses slowly for the general case.

For nearly everyone who you know now who is "famous" you can go back and see
that they have been practicing their art for many years, often several
decades. It is a painful reality that finding an audience is a fickle thing,
and finding your style.

~~~
minimaxir
The difference is that I know Louis C.K. because his content is all about
Louis C.K. On Medium, I _never_ remember _who_ wrote the article since the
author information is always just delegated to a blurb and circular portrait
in the sidebar.

~~~
rhizome
A similar way that I look at it is that Louis's content and work _increases_
his identity (brand, in some circles), where putting work on content farms
like medium.com only _reduces_ identity. Sure, it's "exposure," but, y'know,
we all know about "it'll be good for your portfolio."

Full disclosure: I watched "Tapeheads" just yesterday.

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minimaxir
Relevant self-promotion: I recently did a statistical analysis of medium.com
submissions to Hacker News. I discovered that while the number of submissions
has hockey-sticked, being on medium.com is not a panacea, and most of the
posts that make it to the front page (16% of all medium.com submissions) only
get 10-20 points overall.

[http://minimaxir.com/2013/07/medium-
normal/](http://minimaxir.com/2013/07/medium-normal/)

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jakozaur
Well by my (and Wikipedia[1]) definition Medium is not a "content farm".

Try reading this article replacing Medium with posterous/tumblr/subvtle/Google
+/Wordpress... The content publishing is a commodity, nothing revolutionary or
wrong with it.

[1] (from Wikipedia) "In the context of the World Wide Web, a content farm (or
content mill) is a company that employs large numbers of often freelance
writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically
designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search
engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting
reader page views[1] as first exposed in the context of social spam.[2]"

~~~
msy
Most of those platforms don't demand to own the content you post on them,
that's an important distinction.

~~~
dpup
See "Ownership and Licensing of Intellectual Property" here:
[https://medium.com/policy/9db0094a1e0f](https://medium.com/policy/9db0094a1e0f)

"You retain ownership of all intellectual property rights in your User
Content. Medium (and/or other third parties) retains ownership of intellectual
property rights in all Content other than User Content."

~~~
ealexhudson
It doesn't matter if you retain ownership if you also give them a "broad
license" to re-use the content. Ownership gets you little more than a little
bit of control over your name in parts of Europe.

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dendory
As I writer I know well the devaluation of our trade, especially with online
content farms. It used to be that all texts were paid based on quality and
intended use, such as for a print magazine and so on. Now, everyone pays by
the word, and most people now expect to get content for $2 or less for a full
article, because regardless how low they pay, someone out there will accept to
write. I guess on the case of Medium, make the site look nice enough and
people write for free.

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shortformblog
I think the secret of using Medium is not to bet the farm on it, but to put a
cow or two there just to see if you might get some milk out of the deal.

I feel like that's the point being missed in arguments like these. Medium
shouldn't be your sole content hub, and I don't think it's trying to be—it
should be a tool in your toolbox to stretch the reach of your main content
hub.

~~~
sbarre
Medium allows you to freely link to your own site(s) in your profile, which is
featured next to all your content, so you definitely make a good point about
this.

There's a happy middle ground that a savvy digital writer can find which will
provide them with the advantages of a centralized platform like Medium without
subjecting them to the risks of _only_ using Medium.

If they provided an API that let you syndicate your content from your personal
publishing site (Wordpress, etc) into Medium, then they would increase the
incentive to publish there even more.

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slig
Couple of months ago I remember HN rambling about "you should never trust a
third party to host your content" when posterous.com announced that it would
shut down.

How is medium any different from posterous?

~~~
rfnslyr
Because something something twitter developers something pretty? I honestly
have no idea about Medium hype. It's like Wordpress, but invite only, with one
shitty theme. How awesome.

I'm working on something like Medium meets Flattr. Invite only . I want
quality writers. Users that register can attach a "wallet" of sorts that they
could put money into. The money they have put into their wallet will be
divided by the number of posts they read and shipped off to authors.

Example: I have $20 in my wallet/month because I love reading and I believe in
supporting indie writers. I read 90 articles that month. 20/90 = 0.22 per
writer. I feel like if the service gets enough users, people can make a real
living off it.

~~~
sbarre
I admire your desire to pay writers, but why would I ever pay money to read
your content when other places (including Medium, sorry) provide me with tons
of content to read for free?

Unless you can line up very sought-after writers with name-recognition to
bring in users at first, I think you may have a difficult time convincing
enough people to buy into your model.

That said, I love the idea.. It's basically a magazine.

~~~
rfnslyr
Honestly, I'm someone who makes a decent amonut of money and I don't mind
pitching in to help others especially if I enjoy their content time and time
again.

People with a little money to burn ;)

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davidw
So if you don't want to write there, don't. Problem solved, no? It's certainly
good to point out the license/copyright terms so that others know what they're
getting into, but it doesn't seem like a big deal beyond that.

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noptic
I gues the most import point is you can not be a succesfull "medium" writter
but you can be a succesfull writter who someteimes publishes on "medium"

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the_watcher
What if you are like me, and don't use Medium for anything other than a shiny,
well-designed blog that I didn't have to configure? Writing is just something
I use to keep myself accountable. If I wanted to make money on it I would
absolutely want a host I controlled.

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marknutter
I think it's absurd that there still is no turnkey, dead-simple way for people
to get their own domain name and setup a simple blog or website. I mean,
_dead_ simple, as in equally as simple as signing up for Twitter, Facebook, or
Medium. The power lies in owning your own domain name and all the Google rank
juju that goes with it.

~~~
homosaur
Squarespace comes close, you basically have to pick a theme and start typing,
but it also doesn't offer a free version. I think no one is in this space
because there's no legitimate way to make it happen profitably that users or
readers will accept. A domain name is not free so that's already a non-starter
for many. If Facebook or Twitter cost $10 a year, they might have 2% of their
current user base.

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RobIsIT
In my mind, part of the definition of a content farm is that there are people
"planting seeds". In other words, content farms have a tier of people (or a
process) to orchestrate which content is created in order to generate revenue.

Without this tier, there is too much confusion between the definition of a
platform and a content farm.

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true_religion
By this logic, Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Livejournal.com, Thumblr, Flickr,
and every other free site that allows you to post content is a 'content farm'.

I'd argue that we should use a stricter definition: content farms are those
where the company contracts out for cheap content, writes it internally, or
creates it algorithmically though markov chains and copying other sources on
the internet. It's something where all the information within is directive,
and no interaction is required by users except to simply consume and perhaps
click on ads.

About.com and its ilk? Content farms.

Those sites that copy StackOverflow.com posts? Content farms.

Those SEO sites you keep pulling up when you search for your domain name?
Content farms.

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kamakazizuru
the irony of posting that on Medium... :D

~~~
nkozyra
Given that a large percentage of the intended audience is Medium or on Medium,
I don't think it's particularly ironic.

~~~
amouat
It's definitely ironic to use medium as the platform to say why you shouldn't
use medium, regardless of how much sense it makes.

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nkozyra
The article said you shouldn't use Medium?

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sejje
Yes. If you didn't glean that, you didn't read the article.

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adventured
I think it's a dramatic exaggeration of "content farm" if your use of the term
is so broad that it encompasses every type of web publishing that you don't
personally own.

~~~
thenomad
From reading the article, it seems that the TOS giving Medium a right to
commercially exploit anything published on their platform without compensating
the author is the key point under discussion.

 _" By furnishing your User Content to Medium, you give Medium a broad license
to use and exploit your User Content as it operates and evolves its
business...it is a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free,
sublicensable, transferable license to exploit all copyright rights now in
existence.."_

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xpose2000
I completely agree with what this blog post says. I would never write for
Medium unless they come up with a model where the writers get paid for X
amount of revenue for their posts.

Ideally the revenue model of advertisements... 70 / 30 payout in favor of
writer. If the went down this road and made it successful, then that would be
something.

But even if they did that. Why not just host your own blog if your writing is
doing so well and making money?

~~~
bstpierre
> But even if they did that. Why not just host your own blog if your writing
> is doing so well and making money?

It seems like they would be fulfilling the role of a traditional publisher in
the print world:

* publishing on their site means you don't have to worry about drawing traffic * the aggregation of a bunch of writers means that you have broader topic coverage * aggregation also means you have more content, more likelihood of pulling in visitors

Just because your writing is good doesn't necessarily mean that your blog-
marketing will be good and you'll be able to attract visitors.

And then there's the blog hosting and ad-revenue management that you've got to
figure out. Sure, it's not that hard, and/or you can outsource it, but that's
what the publisher does to earn their 30%.

(I'm not saying that self-hosting is inherently a bad decision, just that it's
not the best thing for everyone.)

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_pmf_
Given that Medium currently has no advertisements, one really wonders what
step 2 could possible be except to display ads once momentum has peaked.

~~~
delinka
It could be selling digital copies on iBooks, Amazon, with B&N. It could be
packaging curated collections as a paid periodical. It could be anything, and
all without compensation to the authors.

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elliottbell
Seems that it's still a fine place for successful writers to sometimes
publish, but it's not the road to success for anyone.

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rfnslyr
So why the fuck are you on Medium then?

