Completely unfair, so much so that I don't think restoring the original title and unflagging this thread is a good idea. Perhaps someone else can repost the article and start an un-skewed discussion about it.
Honestly, I think the submission title doesn't do the article much justice. While it does mention their intention to monetize, it talks about other tings to.
I mean, maybe I don't use it much, but it seems to do a really good job of filtering spam and I don't see much harassment. But it's hard to see opposing views unless you look hard enough for posts which are usually shut down by others. Also, the comments have to be approved by the author which does lead to echo chambers, but they seem to know this since their lawyer Ferrest said that "You shouldn't necessarily be kept safe from other people challenging your ideas."
It's also very SF-centric at times, especially with all the self-help posts, but it does do a good job at content discovery since I can get a wide range of topic from the tech industry through to social issues.
I don't know how they'll sell paywalls to users, though. I mean, the internet has a lot of blogs which are already free to see. Plus, I can use my Pocket recommended feature for diversity right?
I fail to understand what medium adds to any other blogging platform. Especially us technical users have dozens of self-hosted alternatives (in addition to the weird beast that is GitHub pages) that have existed since, like, forever.
Why lock yourself in a proprietary platform that then, invariably (like we are seeing now), is going to have to monetize your content?
Why aren't more people bothered by the fact that more and more previously decentralized/self-hosted models are being transformed to monopolies?
One answer: eyeballs. Medium has managed to bring audiences and audiences bring good writing and money (both to Medium and the writers).
The thing with big sustainable audiences is that there has to be some level of centralization, either of hosted content (medium), or linked content (google).
You don't need a hosted service like medium, but you do need some way to bring the right content to the right people. To be honest, even with great insightful writing, I doubt a single blog can tackle this task. In fact, I think the biggest blogs are big not for the content, but for the marketing/leads generation/traffic building skills of the owners.
The same reason furniture stores and car dealers locate near each other: traffic.
Think of writers with magazines and newspapers. The writers themselves are what make the outlet (plus competent management). If an outlet folds, a great writer moves to another outlet, or takes a break, or writes a book.
You're not tied to any outlet. But it can be an advantage to be associated with one. For awhile.
> Why lock yourself in a proprietary platform that then, invariably (like we are seeing now), is going to have to monetize your content?
Same reason why people use Gmail instead of their self hosted email - convenience. It's even more surprising to see hackers using that kind of service (at least for Medium, Gmail is at at least a superior product in some ways) - while perfectly good self hosted, easy to deploy alternatives exist for years.
> We are going to take things down that are unsafe, that are hate speech, that are harassment. It's not a legal obligation, it's an obligation to the ecosystem of the site.
I like the idea that ad-driven business are not sustainable. Ads are manipulative almost by definition and the world would probably be better without them (even though it's hard to make an argument for disallowing people to present their products in the best way possible).
The problem with monetization I see is that internet usage is so far-spread. The amount of articles I read per week/month might be fairly constant but it's spread among dozens of sites. I don't want to pay for every single read (as that would make me think twice about reading stuff) so the only option is a subscription but then I'd pay $5 or $10 a month for a single site that, last month, I might have only read 3 articles on.
IMO the only solution would be cross-site subscriptions, i.e. you pay for "online reading abo" and get access to like 50 sites. I'd also wish that they then get payed based on how much I read on each site. I'd actually pay for a service like that.
Medium is banking on the other alternative: most sites die off and a natural monopoly emerges because no one wants to pay for access to more than say three sites. They want to be the facebook of long form comment.
Which makes it tough for publishers, but ultimately it's their responsibility to create a product that people do want to pay for. (The existence of reddits like /r/shutupandtakemymoney shows that this happens all the time.) The beauty of the internet is that there are so many sources for so many things, I can almost always go someplace free for whatever it is I seek.
I'll pay for content, but the value has to be there. And in this age of click bait headlines, non researched articles of no susbstance or value, I'm not about to pay for someone's low value opinions. Sure they have value, but it's like $0.02 of value. And it's not scarce. When everyone can create content and publish, and many are willing to do it for free to create their own brand, it creates a market where ideas and words are not monetizable. I don't even mind ads, when done right. A trailer for a movie I want to see is an ad, and I'll seek it out when I want the content. But ad agencies have done this to themselves by becoming a virus on content pages.
Besides, why should I have to pay? I create and consume something far more valuable in the form of OSS. No ads, no price.
To say monetization has to be ads or paywalls is excluding hundreds of other ways to monetize content. It's lazy, and won't succeed in the information era.
My thoughts exactly. So, how is Medium supposed to survive?
I'm not preaching. I'm at least partially in the same boat. I think ads have gotten nearly abusive and I am not sure how much content I'm actually willing to pay for.
The problem for guys like Medium is that there is still an abundance of free content that can be ad blocked, so people will just move elsewhere. So, it seems that lower quality content providers will simply go out of business and the higher quality will shift to paid (provided they can stay in business long enough). Once there are fewer quality choices and most require pay, people will be more willing to pay.
Well sometimes it's a matter of thresholds. Someone upthread was talking about millenials – as a matter of fact we balk at spending any money on online content.
This added to the fact that Medium is basically a glorified blogging platform makes me not want to pay for it. Seriously, if you were to ask me or anyone else back in 2006 what would be the hot new area for monetizing in 10 years, I doubt anyone would have said "blogging with paywalls".
If this is set up as something like "5 free articles a month, then $0.1 to read the article, and 70% goes to the author" then I can see it working very well. Medium has proven that it's capable of attracting some talented writers and making the content discoverable - of all the content sites out there Medium feels like the only one I'd really consider subscribing to.
its sad. i like medium. but i do not pay for articles anymore. somebody's opinion is not worth money. 'free speech' should also mean 'free to access' in the internet age.
I've never understood what's special about medium.com. It seems like any other blog, Wordpress, Blogger, etc. Plain text articles with some images. Or is there something more to it?
People here are complaining about potential censorship and paywalls. Perhaps we can have the best of both worlds and decentralize it, compensate authors and still provide it free.
Implement it as an Ethereum like dapp/smart contract with the same function as Patreon for long-form articles. Make the Dapp usable and accessible through the browser like Instapaper.
Liberate the content, make it 'free' after stretch goals have been reached. Use community curation through voting contracts similar to the slashdot/hl karma points.
Also integrate distributed search, automated tagging and perhaps integrated commenting and Sia or IPFS for distributed storage. And automatically create an epub versions of the top 12 longforms of the week so people can read their longform articles offline on e-paper/paper.
Quora has no paywall (or other revenue stream from what I can tell) but they did make some changes to require logins to access content. Not sure if that is still in-place.
How can someone with previous startup experience can be so shortsighted! Ahhh, now I remember Twitter API restrictions and witch hunting of third party apps and this is coming from the same business culture.
[+] [-] jjoe|10 years ago|reply
"I also think there's a lot of potential for premium or subscription or even user-paid content. Some sort of paywall or membership."
It's unfair IMO.
[+] [-] leereeves|10 years ago|reply
"We're building monetisation into the product right now," says Williams, predicting a roll-out of the features within a month or so.
"We're not limiting ourselves to advertising," he says, stressing that Medium won't become a mess of banner ads but instead "sponsored" content.
"I also think there's a lot of potential for premium or subscription or even user-paid content. Some sort of paywall or membership."
Sounds like sponsored content is the works right now, and paywalls are being considered.
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fgandiya|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmlnr|10 years ago|reply
Yep, on purpose. The original title is misleading as well, presenting medium from a false view.
[+] [-] fgandiya|10 years ago|reply
I mean, maybe I don't use it much, but it seems to do a really good job of filtering spam and I don't see much harassment. But it's hard to see opposing views unless you look hard enough for posts which are usually shut down by others. Also, the comments have to be approved by the author which does lead to echo chambers, but they seem to know this since their lawyer Ferrest said that "You shouldn't necessarily be kept safe from other people challenging your ideas."
It's also very SF-centric at times, especially with all the self-help posts, but it does do a good job at content discovery since I can get a wide range of topic from the tech industry through to social issues.
I don't know how they'll sell paywalls to users, though. I mean, the internet has a lot of blogs which are already free to see. Plus, I can use my Pocket recommended feature for diversity right?
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asymmetric|10 years ago|reply
Why lock yourself in a proprietary platform that then, invariably (like we are seeing now), is going to have to monetize your content?
Why aren't more people bothered by the fact that more and more previously decentralized/self-hosted models are being transformed to monopolies?
[+] [-] kfk|10 years ago|reply
The thing with big sustainable audiences is that there has to be some level of centralization, either of hosted content (medium), or linked content (google).
You don't need a hosted service like medium, but you do need some way to bring the right content to the right people. To be honest, even with great insightful writing, I doubt a single blog can tackle this task. In fact, I think the biggest blogs are big not for the content, but for the marketing/leads generation/traffic building skills of the owners.
[+] [-] a3n|10 years ago|reply
Think of writers with magazines and newspapers. The writers themselves are what make the outlet (plus competent management). If an outlet folds, a great writer moves to another outlet, or takes a break, or writes a book.
You're not tied to any outlet. But it can be an advantage to be associated with one. For awhile.
[+] [-] ekianjo|10 years ago|reply
Same reason why people use Gmail instead of their self hosted email - convenience. It's even more surprising to see hackers using that kind of service (at least for Medium, Gmail is at at least a superior product in some ways) - while perfectly good self hosted, easy to deploy alternatives exist for years.
[+] [-] m52go|10 years ago|reply
Censorship, it seems.
[+] [-] nothis|10 years ago|reply
The problem with monetization I see is that internet usage is so far-spread. The amount of articles I read per week/month might be fairly constant but it's spread among dozens of sites. I don't want to pay for every single read (as that would make me think twice about reading stuff) so the only option is a subscription but then I'd pay $5 or $10 a month for a single site that, last month, I might have only read 3 articles on.
IMO the only solution would be cross-site subscriptions, i.e. you pay for "online reading abo" and get access to like 50 sites. I'd also wish that they then get payed based on how much I read on each site. I'd actually pay for a service like that.
[+] [-] pmlnr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iSnow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermontdevil|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octo_t|10 years ago|reply
People don't want to pay for content, but they also don't want to see ads...
[+] [-] mbrutsch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pheoki|10 years ago|reply
Besides, why should I have to pay? I create and consume something far more valuable in the form of OSS. No ads, no price.
To say monetization has to be ads or paywalls is excluding hundreds of other ways to monetize content. It's lazy, and won't succeed in the information era.
[+] [-] wrong_variable|10 years ago|reply
They can barely afford rent and food.
If you want to monetize you need to either make medium for baby-boomers or change your govt.
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|10 years ago|reply
I'm not preaching. I'm at least partially in the same boat. I think ads have gotten nearly abusive and I am not sure how much content I'm actually willing to pay for.
The problem for guys like Medium is that there is still an abundance of free content that can be ad blocked, so people will just move elsewhere. So, it seems that lower quality content providers will simply go out of business and the higher quality will shift to paid (provided they can stay in business long enough). Once there are fewer quality choices and most require pay, people will be more willing to pay.
In the meantime, it's a tough business to be in.
[+] [-] parennoob|10 years ago|reply
This added to the fact that Medium is basically a glorified blogging platform makes me not want to pay for it. Seriously, if you were to ask me or anyone else back in 2006 what would be the hot new area for monetizing in 10 years, I doubt anyone would have said "blogging with paywalls".
[+] [-] eveningcoffee|10 years ago|reply
With paid content you lose your privacy and you lose your anonymity and you become more easily targetable and more attractive to the ads.
If we take the paper magazines then there are the ads, and you pay for it. I believe the same will happen with the online publishing.
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[+] [-] fsiefken|10 years ago|reply
Implement it as an Ethereum like dapp/smart contract with the same function as Patreon for long-form articles. Make the Dapp usable and accessible through the browser like Instapaper.
Liberate the content, make it 'free' after stretch goals have been reached. Use community curation through voting contracts similar to the slashdot/hl karma points.
Also integrate distributed search, automated tagging and perhaps integrated commenting and Sia or IPFS for distributed storage. And automatically create an epub versions of the top 12 longforms of the week so people can read their longform articles offline on e-paper/paper.
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