
Medium asks $5 a month for nothing - JimWibble
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/24/medium_five_bucks_a_month_for_nothing/
======
jawns
This article is a pretty good take-down of Medium's business model and its
future prospects.

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.

~~~
shawnee_
_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._

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.

------
code4tee
If Medium was 5 people in a basement I'd forgive them for not quite having a
business model sorted out yet.

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.

~~~
BillFranklin
They burn $50m per year and have 60m readers

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.

~~~
code4tee
The NYTimes has some of the world's best journalists writing fantastic
original content that can't be found anywhere else. People will, and do,
subscribe to that.

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.

~~~
arkades
While stated a bit more bluntly than I was thinking of aiming for, I think
you've captured the essence of it. Medium and NYT are wildly different in
their value offering, so much so that their only commonality is that they
involve text on a screen. They don't really make much of a benchmark for
comparison.

------
ThomPete
The problem is that they are trying to fix something which dont need fixing.
Media is not broken, its exactly as good as it can be when so many people have
access to writing whatever they want.

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.

~~~
sparkzilla
This. Medium and most other sites-in-search-of-a-business-model (including the
Register) think that content is king, and that by producing 'better' content
will create more revenue. In fact, distribution is king, and getting more
distribution -- independent of the content -- is the key to success. Consider
a site with high distribution and crap content: It's already making money and
can always improve the content. A site with no distribution can't make money
even if it improves its content.

~~~
user5994461
>>> A site with no distribution can't make money even if it improves its
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

~~~
sparkzilla
> You're on the internet, your content is instantly automatically available to
> 1 billion people.

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.

~~~
user5994461
> 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.

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.

~~~
sparkzilla
The problem with niche content is that it doesn't bring a big audience and is
very time intensive. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

------
alex_hirner
I would pay a few bucks to have my articles proof read and for stylistic
enhancements. How much this producer centric model would yield is another
question...

~~~
mrborgen
That's an interesting angle, charge the creators instead of the consumers. I'm
writing from time to time on Medium myself, and could have paid for that as
well.

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.

~~~
kogepathic
_> If Medium made is super easy (and cheap) to find and buy images for an
article, I'd use it._

Like [https://500px.com/](https://500px.com/) ?

~~~
alex_hirner
I think the trick would be to suggest suitable pictures per paragraph based on
NLP. If to take the highest rated content, there would already be a (biased)
learning set available.

------
reggieband
I think the register makes some excellent points and I don't immediately see
anything I disagree with ... but ...

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

------
neotek
Putting aside the many arguments regarding Medium's direction and quality, the
headline is thoroughly inaccurate since you do, in fact, get _something_ for
your membership: an offline reading list, early access to new Medium features,
and "exclusive stories from top writers" (although the snakey wording on that
one doesn't actually say whether that access is exclusive to you or exclusive
to Medium.)

------
iampliny
Saying that Medium needs to hire writers misses the point entirely. Medium is
a platform--not a publisher or a content studio. SV doesn't like the "studio"
business model because it doesn't scale: there is no such thing as a 100x
writer, 100x animator, or 100x video editor. If you want more output, you have
to hire more people.

(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.

------
anarchitect
I'm happy to pay for things that provide value in my life.

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?

~~~
lathiat
I agree with this,

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

~~~
Baeocystin
I really like Patreon. I spend about the same as you, and it goes directly to
help support the folks that are creating things I think are good. And it is
like you said- the personal connection, and wanting to help support worthy
effort.

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.

------
tmaly
I look at medium as a networked wordpress. That has some nice benefits, but I
am not paying $5 for something I do not control 100%

------
jitix
I might be wrong but it seems that it's a good example of the bubble that
people have been talking about.

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.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
You're making an assumption that they want any of that. They don't. There's no
money in those ideas you just talked about.

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.

------
chirau
The game plan is easy to decipher. Bring them all in and have them appreciate
the features we have, then start charging to ween off the non-serious
bloggers. So ultimately, they are streamlining the user base of their
platform.

------
rileymat2
There is a lot of trashing the idea, probably rightly, but it sounds a lot
like NPR, PBS, WIKIPEDIA taking what amounts to donations. Not as unusual as
the article paints it, except for being for profit.

~~~
onion2k
Exactly. You aren't getting "nothing" for your money. You're contributing to
the continued existence of something you want to continue existing.

------
timvdalen
Medium also started charging $75 for custom domains last month, a feature that
had been free up until that point.

------
synicalx
Next up, they're going to rename themselves to "The Washington Redskins".

------
sjg007
The NPR of blogs?

------
snackai
When I see a nice Headline on HN: "Oh cool, I would love to read that", then I
look at the domain: "Oh it's on medium. Never mind then." I'd never pay for
that shit show.

~~~
fhoffa
Facts: Hacker News gets a ton of articles posted from Medium, but very few of
them get to the front page. Last time I measured there had been 4,108 posts
from medium.com in 2017 (largest source of news for HN), but less than 3% of
them got some upvote traction.

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...](https://medium.com/@hoffa/hacker-news-on-bigquery-now-with-daily-
updates-so-what-are-the-top-domains-963d3c68b2e2)

~~~
user5994461
Can you compare to the stats for wordpress?

~~~
brianwawok
Can't get that out of the URLs, would need to actually crawl the stories.

~~~
user5994461
They can both be redirecting to a custom domain.

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.

------
cocktailpeanuts
Medium is a playground for social justice warriors, shitty wannabe
motivational speakers, and most importantly, people who just want attention to
profit from.

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.

------
ccvannorman
"Medium is still around?"

"Wait, you can pay for Medium?"

Just for kicks I spent 5 minutes on their site and could not figure out how to
pay..

------
montycantsin
Donations aren't really anything new. "Pure Silicon Valley" is thinking that
all transactions need to be for something.

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.

~~~
Zwitty
Safari is the new IE

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
But Safari is still WebKit. The only real problems I have with Safari are with
Flash content(eww).

------
abhv
"After seizing a shipment of Stanley's Snake Oil in 1917 [Medium blog posts in
2017], federal investigators found that it primarily contained mineral oil, a
fatty oil believed to be beef fat, red pepper and turpentine. That's right —
Stanley's [Medium's] signature product did not contain a drop of actual snake
oil [novelty], and hundreds of consumers discovered they had been had."

[http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377/a-history-
of-snake-oil-salesmen)

