
Medium releases Memberships - anaptfox
https://blog.medium.com/upgrade-your-medium-924b74c36552
======
tvanantwerp
> It’s based on the premise that, instead of yet another never-ending feed,
> people would be much happier with a limited set of carefully curated
> stories, chosen by experts among topics we care about.

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...

~~~
Swizec
If I was Medium, I would use machine learning to curate a feed for each
individual subscriber.

Their personalized curated feed is already really good. I had to stop looking
at their weekly email because my clickthrough rate was too high and it was a
time sink.

~~~
bootload
_" If I was Medium, I would use machine learning to curate a feed for each
individual subscriber."_

If I was Medium I'd hire a team (three or four) experienced newspaper editors
[0] and use their expertise to bring back some discipline back to the story
process. Do you remember newspapers? There were hundreds of competing stories
but the news was carefully selected on a daily basis. This is what is lacking.

The machine is being gamed. Maybe the editorial teams' suggestions should be
used to train some aspects of story and category selection? Machine learning
is a tool and if Facebook with all it's propellor heads have a problem, what
hope have Medium? A different approach is needed.

reference

[0] Lots of newspaper people are out of work or under utilised and as such
their availability is high. For example this tweet highlighting guardian
journalists getting the sack:
[https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status/844580929226072065](https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status/844580929226072065)

~~~
Swizec
> Do you remember newspapers?

Honestly? No.

They're that thing my dad would buy on the weekends, read one page of, and
then we'd use it for potato peels, lining the floor when painting rooms, and
stuff like that.

By the time I was old enough to even consider reading newspapers, they had
devolved into clickbait sensationalist garbage. Designed primarily to find
whatever boogeyman would make each newspaper's audience most likely to buy the
issue. For left newspapers the top story was always about a businessman doing
something bad, for right newspapers the top story was about how this or that
nationality is threatening our economy. Sometimes both sides had the top story
as this or that natural disaster or war that happened so far away that it's
irrelevant.

At least the trashy magazines were always honest about being trashy. Their top
story was this or that random celebrity doing some outrageous act that nobody
cares about.

Honestly, the problem is tying remuneration to readership. The other problems
are emergent.

Edit: the intro of this System of a Down video sums up my thoughts excellently
-->
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBGOrI6yBk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBGOrI6yBk)

~~~
arkitaip
Whatever your feelings about newspapers are, they have existed for hundreds of
years and learnt some incredibly valuable lessons about news, journalism,
reader psychology, etc. The collective wisdom of newspapers of record could
fuel countless of business ventures and avoid lots of costly mistakes.

~~~
Swizec
Totally. I just don't think I've ever experienced that. For as long as I can
remember news has been about sensationalism at all cost.

The question was do I personally remember newspapers and the answer is no. I
remember them as a thing that exists, yes, but not as a thing that provides
value.

~~~
hkmurakami
As one of the other commenters suggested, I encourage you to pick up a copy of
the Economist.

~~~
bshimmin
I dearly love The Economist (and, indeed, have a small stack of them about a
foot from me right now), but I do sometimes get the feeling that reading a
newspaper with which I agree so strongly on almost all issues (hell, even the
advertising feels like it's targeted at people _just like me_ ) is probably a
little unhelpful in terms of giving me a balanced perspective on the world.
I'm not sure what one can do to balance this, though - I picked up a copy of
Nexus
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(magazine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_\(magazine\)))
recently and that didn't really much help either, though it was pretty damn
entertaining.

~~~
hkmurakami
I have a friend who is a intelligent, die hard progressive who makes it a
point to read the most extreme right wing news sites, just to glean how a
person on the other side might view and construct the world.

Maybe that is a bit extreme, but I think Economists readers (I think the
publication is center right?) can pick up a center left or far left
publications from time to time.

~~~
bshimmin
It's a bit tricky to pin The Economist to either the left or the right; they
describe themselves as being "radically centrist". This Quora answer from an
Economist writer is good: [https://www.quora.com/Is-The-Economist-left-or-
right](https://www.quora.com/Is-The-Economist-left-or-right)

------
minimaxir
"Exclusive stories from top Medium writers," given the type of content Medium
is prone toward, seems like less of a perk and more of a punishment.

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.

~~~
mgiannopoulos
Not sure why Medium wants to be a publisher. They already have other
publishers using their platform. They can create a subscription feature and
take a cut. Seems like they are going to compete with their most serious
users.

~~~
klyburke
Sounds like they want to be a curator. I agree on the idea to create a
subscription feature and take a cut. Medium has such a big audience that I
think publishers would gladly sell there for a % fee. If they can't do that,
then they'll stick with selling exclusively on their websites.

~~~
nebabyte
Can't see what the advantage is to "paying the curator" though - why give up
control of who my support goes to by letting them split it up amongst their
'elites', when I can just support the content creator(s) I like directly?
Which these days, most people already have avenues for or can set up easily.
It seems in Medium's (or any middlemen in this arena)'s best interest to avoid
that truly 'frictionless' alternative and present themselves as a good
compromise.

As others have pointed out here I don't see how empowering some specific group
to decide is any different from a traditional publisher model, or indeed how
picking a group steeped in a specific culture bubble will 'fix media'. (Though
hey, I invite them to prove me wrong... Any fix would be a welcome fix these
days)

------
ChuckMcM
And it begins again ...

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.

~~~
mstolpm
> 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.

I "love" these calculations: So, you suggest it is okay that the content
generator (aka author) gets 1/5th of the money readers spend, and intermediary
organizations get 4/5th?

What if (in this example) Blendle and Medium somehow fail to generate the
80.000 reads - just by promoting other articles? They get their 4 cents from
other content, the author of the article in the example gets nothing (or much
less) - but is totally depended on Bendle and Medium promoting (and paying)
him.

Why should I, as an author, support the intermediaries in this model? Wouldn't
this model kill quality instead of promoting quality? As an author, I would
still have to favor articles that are written fast and focus on sensationalism
to make a living, not on quality, research and balanced presentation.

~~~
ChuckMcM

       > but is totally depended on Bendle and Medium promoting (and paying) him.
    

What would possibly lead you to think that? All of the existing ways that the
author can make money are still available to her, no opportunity has been
removed. Another opportunity is simply added. If you get a chance some time
pick up a copy of the "Writer's Guide" for the current year.

------
GCA10
This could have been a really smart way to get Medium started a few years ago.
The way the site has been built out, though, this will be quite challenging.

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.

~~~
tima101
fair observation overall, but not sure about "patience" \- in 3 years, who
knows how much of current VC funding remains.

~~~
GCA10
Good point. In the do-over category, starting out with a small business that
could recalibrate at $500k/iteration instead of $30m/iteration might have
helped.

------
zmitri
I had a startup that tried something like this.

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.

~~~
thedarkginger
Have always been interested in why few startups try to do this. "Netflix for
journalism" seems like such a low hanging fruit pitch, at least to get funding
that you'd think more folks would have at least tried.

After moving to the crowdfunding model, what was the primary problem? Were the
unit economics not conducive to retaining good writers who would attract
readers, or conversely was there no way to sustain a margin for the platform?

~~~
CM30
The problem is the same one that Medium will likely soon find out.

The news market is a heavily competitive one, with hundreds of sites offering
everything for free with ads. As a result, most people just don't see the need
to pay for news. They can find the exact same information in a million other
places, and the friction from going from 'free with ads' to 'pay for content'
is fairly considerable.

It's like trying to sell a smartphone app. The pressures against it are
considerable due to the race to the bottom and a large percentage of people
just don't see the point in paying.

So it's a business that's hard to build trust in, requires a decent amount of
marketing/awareness, will attract a far smaller audience than the free sites
and ends up being a difficult one to monetise properly.

~~~
thedarkginger
Totally agree. The only advantage I could see them working is being able to
act as a central platform for paid outlets.

Digital subscriptions (NY Times, Washington Post) have seen a boost since the
election in the U.S., but does anyone pay for multiple subscriptions? It's
frustrating - even as someone who really wants to support media - that each
outlet has their own barrier.

This is so different from how we consume other media (video: Amazon Prime,
HBO, Netflix; music: Spotify, Apple Music) where I can get access to a library
and it makes the tradeoff with finding a free version online easier to deal
with.

To my knowledge, major publishers have never tried this and they instead are
caught in the digital impression arbitrage game.

Admittedly, Medium doesn't have those publishers on board but I do think
that's an angle the market has not tested/figured out.

------
ballenf
> 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. Those who have hard-won expertise, do exhaustive
> research, and think deeply. Those who make us all smarter. Those who
> maximize our understanding of the world but _don’t necessarily maximize
> clicks_ — and, therefore, are at a disadvantage amongst the highly optimized
> algorithm chum being slung by the truckload by low-cost content purveyors.
> [emphasis mine]

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?

~~~
orasis
They don't want to incentivize people writing just to get maximum clicks.

~~~
ballenf
I get that, but don't you sort of have to trust that your users are smart
enough to 'heart' the articles that are of value to them? It _almost_ feels
like he's saying 'our readers aren't smart enough to know good writing from
clickbait'. Which might be true, but that's not exactly a sales pitch that's
going to make me want to subscribe.

Just take my $5 and divvy it up among all the articles I hearted. Keep it
simple!

I've read so much great stuff on Medium I'd hate to see it fail. But, the
hand-picked articles on the front page are almost never ones I really value.
Maybe I'm just not Medium's target audience.

~~~
JasonSage
I'd pay to not have to spend any time deciding if an article is an actual good
article or if it is just clickbait.

I read way less than I could because I don't want to spend precious minutes
every day sifting through random articles. There's way less opportunity cost
compared to Hacker News or even Reddit where I can get quality reading for not
a lot of effort.

~~~
franzen
Want to develop a HN for writers with me?

------
cyberferret
When I first got the oh so very secret and cool, private 'invite' email, I
thought "Great - they are gong to reward me for being one of the first people
to sign up and post articles way back when they launched!"...

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.

------
tima101
It's easy to criticize Medium, and I wish they started with direct
monetization earlier or went 100% native ads. Now Medium has somewhat limited
choice. Reason is because it's not a publisher, it's a platform for different
types of publishers.

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.

------
cbanek
This might be misreading things, but it feels like Medium is trying to be less
of a publishing platform (like a twitter), and trying to turn more into a
media/content company.

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.

------
the_common_man
It's a bit dishonest that first they said they are going to develop tools for
ads. They tried that and failed. Now they try to spin this as if they are on a
mission to rescue the world from ads. Very dishonest.

------
jdoliner
I'm always dubious of startups based on how the founder wants the world to be.
Even if there are a lot of people who want it to be that way too, markets have
a way of foiling such plans.

------
mgiannopoulos
The page says I joined in 1970 :D
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/sfa1imgle0zn6vk/Screenshot%202017-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/sfa1imgle0zn6vk/Screenshot%202017-03-22%2022.05.26.png?dl=0)

~~~
X-Istence
unix timestamp 0.

~~~
mgiannopoulos
Indeed. But I would hope they have my real registration date somewhere :)

------
on_and_off
>We’re still writing this next chapter of Medium. Our members program is
currently in limited release, but we’ll open up to more readers soon. So click
the button below, and we’ll notify you as soon as you can join.

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.

~~~
csallen
Why does that bug you? How else are they supposed to notify you without you
opting in to be notified?

Or, if what you're insulted by is having to pay, how does this differ than
being notified about other paid products and services e.g. the launch of the
next Google Pixel phone?

~~~
Aeolun
It's about being made to wait to give them money.

It's like you go to the store, standing there with your bills in hand, and the
guy just says 'please wait there, I'll get to you when I'm ready.' then
proceeds to have a smoke break.

~~~
csallen
I see your point, but I don't think the analogy fits. In that case, it's
infuriating because (a) you actually had to travel to the store, and (b) it's
supposed to be open right now.

Medium's new business simply isn't ready yet. It's like the restaurant that
across the street from my apartment last year and put up a "Grand Opening:
March 15th" sign in February. Or Apple announcing their new iPhone before its
release. Etc. Nothing wrong with that.

------
snarf21
I think Medium definitely needs a subscription plan of some kind. I think
others are like me and would be glad to pay a monthly patronage to encourage
good writing. The key is making sure the money gets to the creators so the
content can drive the audience. The tricky part is doing it in such a way that
the system can't be gamed.

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.

~~~
username223
> 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...

Isn't this just clickbait all over again? If you were actually willing to pay
for good writing, a simple email address or paypal link would be enough. But
you aren't, so it's not, and online writers have to do all sorts of strange
things to pay the bills.

~~~
snarf21
I'm not sure what you mean by clickbait. The thing I think you are paying
Medium for is discovery from the user side. The writers are attracted there
for the audience side. So let's say I'm an author and I put I paywall in front
of my articles. How do I get 100K people to even read my free article and come
to my site? I agree that if that problem were easy, I'd not need Medium. I
also think that by paying for the bundle, I'm more likely to consume up to
that amount meaning more writers get paid which encourages more articles and
more writers to try also.

------
franzen
For anyone curious, here's a comparison of the signed-out, signed-in, and
"members" signed-in homepage:

[http://imgur.com/gallery/h3tN3](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.

------
yladiz
I'm not in a position to downplay or comment on Medium as a platform, as I
don't actively read it and when I see posts linked to it from places like here
I often don't read them, but in the articles I have read I've rarely found
anything truly substantial or of note (outside of some programming articles)
when comparing to more traditional news organizations like Economist or newer
news organizations like Quartz, and so when I read that they want to funnel
money into content that truly makes me think or learn something, I'm not sure
if I buy it. Sure, I've read blog posts about postmortems and about product
releases, but rarely have I found anything that makes me learn more about the
world, like for example, a more nuanced understanding of the reasons behind
the South Korean ex-president's impeachment. I'm sure Medium could pull it
off, but I'm not convinced yet that they will.

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.

------
bsbechtel
I would like to see a pay per post model to access content from certain
writers or certain collections. There is a lot of technical content shared on
Medium that is really valuable, and most definitely worth paying for. I would
much rather see the writers decide what of their content is worth charging for
and what should be free versus Medium making this decision for the community.

------
6stringmerc
We'll see how this plays out. I got an invitation email from Medium to submit
a pitch and compensation amount. I've received an automated response regarding
the submission, in that they have a lot to go through and will only contact
those they are interested in, that sort of thing.

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.

------
urda
Smells like desperation, especially coming in hot after recent layoffs.
Blogger didn't shatter records or change the world, and honestly we're not
going to see that with Medium. I am glad they are enjoying their time in the
sun though, as limited as it may be.

------
klyburke
Medium had a beta for subscriptions + monetization tools last year for
individual publishers. A few examples: [http://www.poynter.org/2016/facing-
shutdowns-and-stagnating-...](http://www.poynter.org/2016/facing-shutdowns-
and-stagnating-readership-independent-publications-are-finding-new-life-on-
medium/429164/)

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.

------
Kinnard
I wonder what a medium + brave partnership would look like . . . For those who
don't know brave: [http://brave.com](http://brave.com)

------
altonzheng
I really hope this works out for Medium. Although $5/month is not a lot to pay
for quality reading content (a book is like $10...) people have grown so used
to paying next to nothing for content. Will be interesting to see if recent
trends, like fake news and more awareness of clickbait, have people realizing
that. Maybe our tastes for information will evolve like our appetite for fast
food - we'll realize the crap we're stuffing in ourselves mentally. I'm
optimistic.

~~~
subpixel
I pay for the New York Times and Netflix because several times a week I want
something that they have and that I can only get if I pay them.

I'd like for Medium's plan to succeed, but I don't feel any similar urgency
about the content they host, so I'm not sure how they will get people like me
to open our wallets.

~~~
crispyambulance
I do the same as you (pay for NYTimes + Netflix). I also like Medium a lot,
but can't see the benefit at this time for paying them.

On the one hand, having superstar writers/journalists might be an inducement.
On the other, some of the best reads from Medium have been deeply intimate
pieces from non-writers.

The publications concept in Medium has sometimes been great. I really like
"Backchannel" and "Bullshitist." But these publications have a tendency to die
out (eg "Matter", and some I can't remember).

It would take an amazing "federation" of thought-leaders curating phenomenal
articles to convince me to fork-over a monthly fee in addition to what I pay
for the NYTimes.

------
apeace
How are they going to decide the portion of the money that goes to each
writer?

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.

------
cbeach
[https://twitter.com/ev](https://twitter.com/ev)

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.

------
iamdave
Why do I feel like this is just going to create a feeling of "serfdom"
(there's got to be a word for this that stings less) of writers who choose to
publish on Medium?

-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.

------
vit05
I think besides the subscription, the most important news in the post is that
they are trying to kill the infinite feed and starting offering Human-Curated
articles.

"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."

------
james_pm
$5 = introductory price. I assume it'll go higher?

"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%.

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thewhitetulip
It would be interesting to see the shift from decades old advertising pattern
to membership. I wonder what will happen to the general Internet and the
future companies when advertising itself is scorned down upon. There is a
reason why adverts were invented, so that every company isn't a walled garden.
We live in interesting times!

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omarforgotpwd
Hey listen man I need a business model. How about you give me your money? I
got some great stories I could tell you

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kolemcrae
It looks to me like they want to do a Netflix like system but for long form
content. The $5 goes towards hiring a specific writer to do a specific in
depth article (or series). Unless I am misunderstanding.

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jv22222
IMHO Micro payments should have been the play here.

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Animats
It's based on the premise that people go to Medium's home page, and are
willing to pay to do that.

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allenleein
User since 2010 beta. Ok now I get it, new media and new business model:
secret society.

~~~
angry-hacker
SV has that privilege. It's s snowball effect and eventually crashes just like
the rest in the graveyard I can't even remember to name. What was that
platform where you were able to give kudos? Quora was shilled heavily too,
then suddenly hated by everyone, etc etc.

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human_error
tl,dr: We're running out of money. Investors are waiting with their
pitchforks.

------
tonystubblebine
Super early--but I can share a little bit about what I'd consider the product
side. In the case of Memberships, the a big part of the product is what
content you're going to have access too. (And important to note, this is going
to be content that wouldn't exist without memberships.)

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.

------
evanvanness
they really should have done a token model on Ethereum, loosely similar to
Steemit. That would have been interesting.

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

~~~
postscapes1
I was hoping for the same thing.

Wondering if the click bait type articles this might promote was a reason to
not pursue this direction.

------
dilemma
Patreon but instead of a single creator or publisher, you patronize Medium.
That's a start, and in the future they may launch something more targeted.
But:

>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.

~~~
harryh
_Medium has no journalism and no good writing._

This is wrong. [https://theringer.com/](https://theringer.com/), for example,
is hosted on Medium.

~~~
paulcole
Go back and reread any of Rembert Explains America on Grantland. There's
nothing even approaching that on The Ringer.

Sure Grantland had a lot of silly pop culture stuff, but it had good
journalism and writing, too.

It's really sad that Bill Simmons seems to truly believe people only want the
short, superficial shit that's on The Ringer.

~~~
harryh
Critique the quality of The Ringer compared to Grantland all you want. I'll
agree with you. But The Ringer isn't content marketing.

~~~
paulcole
I didn't call it content marketing, I called it "short, superficial shit".

~~~
harryh
Dilemma called it content marketing. My comment was in response to that
original assertion.

------
dang
Url changed from
[https://medium.com/membership](https://medium.com/membership) to one that
gives more background.

------
HalfwayToDice
Medium STILL crashes Safari 9 on Mac. The only website that does this, for
months and months. Congratulations guys, I don't know how you do it!

