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Medium Membership — $5/month for an ad-free experience with premium content
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Chris Messina
Top Hunter
So... Medium is the new NPR?
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It's no surprise Medium's heading in this direction after @ev's blog post announcing a change in their business model. I'm hopeful and curious to see how its received, but it's unclear what type of content $5/mo will buy you right now.
Curious to hear peoples' thoughts on this!
@rrhoover maybe it's just me, but it's also unclear what not paying gets you. Does Medium have ads? (I used to use it daily, but must confess haven't as much in recent months but don't think I've noticed ads before). Is this in conjunction with starting to run ads for those who don't pay?
@rrhoover @ev I think $5/mo is to test drop off rate / price acceptance.
Idea: Lots of companies host their corporate blogs on Medium, so why not give them the ability to sponsor paid memberships to have more inclusivity on Medium Premium? It would be a tax write off for them, and it would grow Medium's premium memberships too. Win-win.
@rrhoover it's only a matter of time until the vast majority services go premium, no matter how large is the funding pocket. I'm curious to see if that's going to be enough, given that they are now crossing that "need-cash" line.. On a second note, we do not exactly know whether they ad model is profitable and well engaged enough to sustain such modification in their biz model. It sure will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
@rrhoover @ev seems like a tough business, there's so much awesome free content out there. I wish the Medium team the best with this new direction! Charging subscribers for great articles definitely helps keep Medium aligned with the customers, instead of making them the product for advertisers *edited to be less negative
I signed up. I love Medium, and I like the idea of paying to support writers, not using ads.
Only question is will any writer be able to monetize similar to Adsense?
@joshdance You won't be able to include ads, but certain writers will be able to charge for their stories. I'm not sure exactly what the process is though. They haven't said much about it. (source: I was invited to become one of these writers)
Interesting, I wonder how compensation will work for writers? I signup up, primarily from a research / curiosity reason. Not sure why, but my profile says "Member Since 1970" 🤔
well, for 3 dollars i can remove ads on wordpress.com and do lots more in the way of content exposure and customizations - and for 8 bucks i can monetize - so 5 bucks for what exactly? patronage?
@passingnotes @chrismessina wordpress doesn't have the social-media component that medium has ...Hearts,Followers,Trending articles. This is the medium allure for me.
@chrismessina free to read! but i can pay nominal fees to generate and monetize content, access themes and tools, etc - love medium, but love lots of other sites - at a certain point you have to just tell the subscription economy to screw itself and stop trying so hard - not everything merits a recurring fee, just not realistic to build the future of web services this way
@eonpilot @chrismessina uh, free plugins supported by kazillions of devs that do all that ornamental labor?
@passingnotes the book "Free" by Chriss Anderson @wired agrees with you. https://www.amazon.com/Free-Futu...
I wish @Twitter would offer a similar monthly service with no ads and premium features. 😄
@chrismessina @gabriel__lewis an anti-troll tool could be available on plugins marketplace :P
I wonder if any of the early access features will be for writers who don't intend to charge for their content. They've been exploring with new analytics emails for us, and I'm sure there's plenty of things they can do to help me become a better writer.
As there is so many places to consume so much content, it is refreshing to see Medium execute so well in this space for such a small price. Will likely be a long-time paying member.
Pros:Awesome content & one of the best platforms to pay for quality
Cons:I want to see more still. The feed has changed since launch and it's getting better!
As a regular Medium reader, I'm definitely interested in paying a subscription for premium content. Very excited to try it out!
$60/year to read amateur writing (like mine) and leftist rants on Medium? No thanks. It doesn't hold enough value for me personally. Even though I have 7 publications on Medium and love to write, but there are far too many other ways to write online and read quality writing for free or without a perpetual subscription. I don't write for the exposure and audience-building, so that doesn't matter to me, and I can, and do when necessary, do that myself with self-hosted sites. Evan didn't really outline what value people get for their money, and the blog post he sent out yesterday was basic marketing the program, through and through. (Roll this out to limited numbers of people, as an "exclusive" offer, etc...please. Is anyone without a Medium account really not going to be able to pay them?)
I love the intention behind this move and I'm intrigued enough to give it a try but echoing @rrhoover's thoughts: not sure what the "exclusive" stories entail?
I also feel this is disadvantageous to those who can't afford a membership. Personally would prefer what Wait But Why has done by using Patreon, where the few support the many and all content is available to everyone. As patrons, we get sneak peaks and early access but not necessarily paid-only content.
Once an avid reader of Medium, I find myself no longer engaged these days and that's while it's still free! One of the big attractions for writing on Medium was the extra traffic but presumably this value will now decline with the paywall. Personally I'd much rather see a 'Pay to Follow' mechanic where I can make micro subscriptions to my favourite writers to gain exclusive content and/or early access while knowing the majority of the payment (70%?) is going to the writer. Medium felt like it had the potential to become a marketplace.. Shame really.
Looks good! I'd like to know what the benefits for writers are going to be. That could be an interesting side of the coin to look at.
Really interesting. If I were @ev, I'd try to push the whole Medium idea in a podcast format — as Medium is about sharing thoughts & experiences, through words or audio. Mediumcast could be another reason for users to pay the $5 subscription.
@perte @ev I love the idea of a medium podcast...I think there is a very real b2b business opportunity in manually curating information.
This is a blog post I wrote in 2011: http://www.drewmeyersinsights.co...
My suggestion to Medium... is to syndicate existing high quality paywalled content from great publications and pay them royalties based on readership rather than trying to create yet another separate publication. I'd happily pay for great writing and journalism, but the problem is it doesn't make sense to subscribe to half a dozen publications when I can only consume a handful of articles of each one every month. Comes Medium, the place where I can read premium content in a great reading experience, without advertising, and I can reward publishers by simply consuming content. Think Netflix for reading, where "Medium Originals" live alongside the big studios hits.
@francoismat excelent marketing from medium. Launch a feature with out telling us how it will work. Internet speculates and creates buzz. 🤓
Are non-journos/randos' ramblings really worth $5/month? I'm surprised they didn't charge writers and organizations for branding/CNAMEs instead. I feel like Medium is far more valuable for writers than readers.
I feel like a publisher-funded platform would work better than a reader-funded one. Paying $5/month for everything adds up quickly and it's much easier for a reader to stop reading premium content than it is for a business to stop publishing where they earn a ton of traffic.
What makes Medium valuable as a reader is that content is available, shareable and curated. What makes Medium valuable as a writer is the community, ease-of-access, and discoverability.
It seems like having content producers fund the project rather than the readers would provide a better revenue stream. Wordpress work this way letting most content producers produce free or very cheaply while the corporations with huge custom needs fund a large chunk of it.
Monetizing publisher-level features like custom domains, custom page layouts, custom support/commenting tools seems much more user-friendly.
Upon seeing the invitation, I quickly signed up. Totally agreed the media/ad model is severely broken, and am glad they are doing something different to show there is another way to build a business. It's ultimately a very similar mindset we're planning with horizonapp.co to convincing people to pay directly for the product rather than force us into an ad model.
I like the idea but its really unclear as to who gets what in this model. Is medium creating a paywall for other publications that are using its service as a distribution platform? Then why not just pay the publication? I'm all for supporting writers but transparency is key here.