>The reason we pay news outlets for content is for their editorial function: curating writers, picking and choosing worthwhile topics, polishing the output, etc. This editorial function has no implicit value, but neither does the content; the value is in the combination of strong content with good editorial technique.
I don't think that's explicitly and consciously the case. Today that everybody can publish on the web, such curation might be especially needed, and payed for (to remove the noise).
But back in the day, we paid news outlets because that was how we got articles -- whether they were curated or not was a secondary concern.
People couldn't just buy paper and bare printing costs, handle distribution deals etc and distribute their own articles. So if we wanted articles we had to buy them in newspaper/magazine form. Curation came with that -- not as an inherent demand.
>My sense is that Medium isn't doing this, that they are instead just charging for content, which completely misses the point.
Not really. The whole point of internet distrubution, what was hailed as revolutionary, was the ability to 'skip the gatekeeper', publish directly to everybody, and grow your own audience.
Medium is still kind of a middleman, but they're not a gatekeeper, in the sense that the editor in chief of an old news outlet was.
Their whole point is giving people direct access to any content writer they like. If someone doesn't care for one, they can read others. No curation necessary, not only because you can discover yourself which authors you like, but also because Medium has infinite space for articles -- not the 100-200 pages of a newspaper/magazine.
It's the same deal with independent musicians selling their wares directly.
I feel like you said lots of stuff that is true but isn't a response to my point.
You said that back in the day we paid for news because of scarcity due to the costs of printing and distribution. That's true, but I'm not talking about back in the day, I'm talking about now. The value in the business model now is in the combination of strong content and editorial.
You're saying that Medium is a middle-man but not a gatekeeper. That seems true to me, but what I'm saying is: that model doesn't make much sense. The majority of value provided by content middle-men is in doing gatekeeping well.
I'm very interested in direct-to-audience models for creators. But it isn't clear to me that that's what Medium is doing... Maybe it is, but it's not how I think about it (yet), so maybe they need to talk that up more.
>You said that back in the day we paid for news because of scarcity due to the costs of printing and distribution. That's true, but I'm not talking about back in the day, I'm talking about now.
Well, if you're talking about now, then one needs to add that today don't generally pay for most of our news content. We get it for free. Only select outlets managed to make paying work (e.g. Economist, NYT and a few more).
We do however, today, have systems for bypassing gatekeepers, curation, and paying content creators directly: from YouTube vloggers and Medium authors, to Patreon comic makers, artists and so on.
>that model doesn't make much sense. The majority of value provided by content middle-men is in doing gatekeeping well.
Well, the majority of people don't seem to care for those gatekeepers anymore. Medium had millions of viewers without gatekeeping. Facebook has billions of eyeballs hooked on reading whatever crap stories and content is put out there (I mean, aside from personal feed posts).
So while there might be value in gatekeepers and curation, that's not really a much better business model than what Medium does.
>So while there might be value in gatekeepers and curation, that's not really a much better business model than what Medium does.
To add to this, this was the misguided idea that news people had, thinking it would allow them to survey.
That "Sure, we might now have 10000000 sources of free content, but because of that people will value our curation that separates the wheat from the chuff more, and pay us for that" (or, in a variation of this, our "professionalism" and "knowledgable meta-analysis of news").
Turned out not to be the case. 90% of the people are totally fine with those 10000000 random sources of free news, thank you very much.
It has turned out to be the case. Selling the combination of good content and good editorial through the internet is a successful business model. It just isn't a broadly successful business model. It only works for a few prestigious brands. Charging for print content worked for a lot more smaller and more obscure outfits like local news organizations, but on the internet, everyone competes with everyone, and those outfits can't compete with the big names. I personally think that's a bummer, but it doesn't mean that pay-for-content-and-editorial is a dead business model, it has just changed to the kind of model where a few well-known companies accumulate all the benefit.
Of course there are other successful business models too, which you and your parent have mentioned a couple of:
You can sell ads against "10000000 random sources of free news". Lots of people are doing this, but most of the profit accrues to the big advertising sellers rather than the content creators, but still, it does work. I would personally rather be one of the companies with enough clout to go the pay-for-content-and-editorial route.
There is also direct-to-customer, like lots of people do with Patreon or some people do by running their own subscription services (like Stratechery or Sam Harris). This seems like a really good model to me, but I think it's still pretty nascent and hard to make money with.
But what I've been saying in this thread is: what model is Medium going for? They have a pay-wall, so it isn't the second model (free news), but they don't seem to be doing editorial so I don't think it's the first model, and they also don't seem to be aiming at their creators building a person-to-person following, so it doesn't seem like the third model either.
I'm just not sure where they fit in, is all I'm saying.
I don't think that's explicitly and consciously the case. Today that everybody can publish on the web, such curation might be especially needed, and payed for (to remove the noise).
But back in the day, we paid news outlets because that was how we got articles -- whether they were curated or not was a secondary concern.
People couldn't just buy paper and bare printing costs, handle distribution deals etc and distribute their own articles. So if we wanted articles we had to buy them in newspaper/magazine form. Curation came with that -- not as an inherent demand.
>My sense is that Medium isn't doing this, that they are instead just charging for content, which completely misses the point.
Not really. The whole point of internet distrubution, what was hailed as revolutionary, was the ability to 'skip the gatekeeper', publish directly to everybody, and grow your own audience.
Medium is still kind of a middleman, but they're not a gatekeeper, in the sense that the editor in chief of an old news outlet was.
Their whole point is giving people direct access to any content writer they like. If someone doesn't care for one, they can read others. No curation necessary, not only because you can discover yourself which authors you like, but also because Medium has infinite space for articles -- not the 100-200 pages of a newspaper/magazine.
It's the same deal with independent musicians selling their wares directly.