I like Medium and want them to succeed so maybe I'll join for that reason, but I was really expecting them to deliver a much more creative business model than pay to kill ads.
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as someone who loves music but refuses to pay for spotify... i am strangely down to pay for medium!
@eonpilot false dichotomy i would imagine. As I don't think that the presupposition that medium is akin to Spotify is correct (my bad). I think that medium is more like SoundCloud -- good artists that can remix and improvise as they go along. Whereas spotify is more akin to the news, say bloomberg - it is more grown up and 'proffesional'.
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I believe that subscriptions to software and content alike will continue displacing ads as the de facto revenue model. This is a welcome step in that direction.
@mbalex99 whaaa...I have to bargin for svn at 6$ then. Damn it the github kramdown flavour is 1$ extra so its still 7$.....redcarpet flavour is on sale at 0.5$...now I have too many choices 😑
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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.
@jcampbell_05 This could play into a good eco-system as part of the sharing economy. Maybe people could pay their fave writers for content they like. I think @brainpicker does this, and I've been supporting her for maybe a year now. cc @ev
@nassaraf@jcampbell_05@brainpicker@ev it would be cool if Medium skewed this towards a non-spottify-modell and more like a vinyl model. Sell 5 copies and still have coin for lunch. As opposed to spott...sell 50k copies maybe chicken noodles for you.
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I really enjoy the idea to support someone on Medium just like you can do on Twitch.
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Too early to tell. However, five bucks a month is a lot of money. I pay less than that for most of my tools (individually) on the net that I reply on to run my businesses. As a magazine creator I don't see this solving my two biggest issues: a paywall like mechanism for my premium content (I may want to charge upwards of $500 to $1000 per year for a "private letter" offering) and we _still_ need an eCommerce widget.
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@jeff_ski_kinsey You want to charge 10x what you aren't willing to pay? :thinking_face:
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@lauraglu Yes. The marketplace has set a norm for such services and Medium apparently failed to take this into consideration. For example, Wordpress starts at $2.99/mo and there are thousands of themes and plugins to make it valuable. Then, there is Medium. What I can charge has almost no bearing on what I will pay for a tool to facilitate a product offering. I doubt I am the only one thinking the current state of Medium doesn't warrant the premium price. But opinions are sure to vary.
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@jeff_ski_kinsey The $2.99/mo is for authors on wordpress, not readers. Medium is charging readers, just like you are talking about.
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