Medium Membership - $5/month for an ad-free experience with premium content

@rrhoover @ev I'm curious too. Maybe writers will be able to publish free and paid posts, and only membership users will be able to access paid content. I'm more curious how will be the payment process for writers.

@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

@sebfeed @rrhoover @ev you're forecasting the end of value-exchange systems?

@gabriel__lewis and fewer trolls?

@chrismessina @gabriel__lewis an anti-troll tool could be available on plugins marketplace :P

@gabriel__lewis @twitter me too... I'd pay

@bentossell @caseynewton what's your venmo username?

@andrewett NSFW

@caseynewton @andrewett That's a weird venmo username

@caseynewton I'll Snapcash you

@akshayspaceship I haven't seen adds as well

@lisadziuba @akshayspaceship Are there ads on the internet? Whaa 😜

@akshayspaceship There are ads. I am seeing Twenty20 Stock Photos ad since couple of weeks I think. Though it's aesthetics are better so it's easy to overlook and not be annoyed by it like FB ads.

@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)

@joshdance general display CPMs are so low these days

@kmehrabi They have no choice if they're doing an ads-free model.

@nassaraf no way. they are a social content site. twitter didn't have a business model at all for many many years. there's a lot of money to be made on back-end data vending - pretty common for ad-free/pre-ad business model companies. snapchat did it for years.

@kmehrabi The runway isn't even close, but let's play along. Twitter: Rolled out ads 3 years after Series A. Total of $1.16B investment with 319M monthly active users. Medium: Rolling out $5/mo/user on "premium" 3 years after Series A. Total of $132M investment with 30M MAU. **The only interesting thing to note is that @ev knows that ads don't work, otherwise he'd have followed Twitter's lead.** Backend data only gets you so far before investors start getting pissed and want to see real revenue.

@nassaraf @kmehrabi also, what interesting "backend data" does Medium have? Yes, the content is good, and some of the preferences data is generally useful, but it doesn't have the volume or velocity of signals that a Twitter or Foursquare does. It'd be hard to turn Medium into a data business because it's not really set up that way. As @ev said a long time ago: Medium is a "platisher".

@chrismessina good question. I can only speculate since I've never worked nor consulted for them. Having said that, they have a very unique data set. 1) It's uniquely a lot of data, being one of the most trafficked print content consumption platforms out there. 2) The profound diversity of content (anything goes on medium) makes for unique insights in discovery of relational interests (as well as varying degrees of relative engagement) from user to user. Really Facebook is the only other data player that contends on that level. 3) Since the platform is specific to print content the relational discoveries are unique to print media consumption. 4) Facebook's insights aren't as 'clean' on that front (don't get me wrong, it's better in every other way) for 2 reasons: i. facebook users are often highly superficial about print content - just looking at the picture, the headline, and the social caption, then sharing/liking/whatever and moving on - not necessarily clicking on the link even ii. facebook users are bouncing from print content, to videos, to social photos, to profiles, to messaging, etc etc.

@johnrmeese mine too! i wasn't even born yet ;)

@johnrmeese same here regarding my profile! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@johnrmeese unix time starts on January 1st 1970, so it's probably something to do with that

@leahculver Same - will give up 1.3 cappuccinos I guess for that. :)

@lauraglu Yeah, the cost is so low! I'm hoping the content will easily be worth it. ☕️