> We will be routing 100% of the revenue from founding members (those who sign up in the first few months) to writers and independent publishers who have important work to do. Those who have hard-won expertise, do exhaustive research, and think deeply. Those who make us all smarter. Those who maximize our understanding of the world but don’t necessarily maximize clicks — and, therefore, are at a disadvantage amongst the highly optimized algorithm chum being slung by the truckload by low-cost content purveyors. [emphasis mine]
Is he saying that subscription revenue is going to writers hand-picked by Medium editors and not driven by writers who have more readers? I don't get that approach. If anything, as a subscriber I'd want my subscription dollars to go to the writers of articles I've liked/recommended. Why are they demonizing those kinds of clicks?
This was the initial vision of Medium. They then handed over the keys to those with most Twitter followers, rewarding Silicon Valley darlings and those already good at drawing attention to themselves.
The prospect of paying $5 a month to fill Bill Simmons, MG Siegler or Anil Dash's pockets some more doesn't really appeal.
I think this could turn away a big majority of writers who have great content but aren't well known. Kinda like Spotify dollars are all going to the top pop singers but not many of the indie bands that people really love. And if Medium was really going to pay all the writers, how much would they end up with? Couldn't be more than pennies. As a writer, I'd rather have the ability to sell my own subscription on Medium, and get paid by my loyal readers.
Its a decent platform that would make some money, but not the kind of amounts it raised.
I like what YouTube did with YouTubeRed, give an option to people not have ads is the way, but keep it accessible to every one. I think that is their only solution, but now they have doubled down on no-ads. God Bless Them.
I get that, but don't you sort of have to trust that your users are smart enough to 'heart' the articles that are of value to them? It almost feels like he's saying 'our readers aren't smart enough to know good writing from clickbait'. Which might be true, but that's not exactly a sales pitch that's going to make me want to subscribe.
Just take my $5 and divvy it up among all the articles I hearted. Keep it simple!
I've read so much great stuff on Medium I'd hate to see it fail. But, the hand-picked articles on the front page are almost never ones I really value. Maybe I'm just not Medium's target audience.
> It almost feels like he's saying 'our readers aren't smart enough to know good writing from clickbait'. Which might be true, but that's not exactly a sales pitch that's going to make me want to subscribe.
Yep. It's not really doing or saying anything to assure readers that they know where the quality lies, just giving the same 'media sucks, let's improve it' spiel that most publications start out with, minus the commitment a publication has to cater to its readers (donating through medium essentially gives up your control as to who gets supported, as opposed to the straightforward idea of donating to the publisher/writers you like directly).
I can't see many people as opinionated as medium users lining up to give up that control for blind faith in a platform, but hey, I guess tumblr got enough people to buy into the idea of their convention to fund their ball pit, so who knows, maybe it'll work out.
I'd pay to not have to spend any time deciding if an article is an actual good article or if it is just clickbait.
I read way less than I could because I don't want to spend precious minutes every day sifting through random articles. There's way less opportunity cost compared to Hacker News or even Reddit where I can get quality reading for not a lot of effort.
Good articles and many clicks (readers) aren't each others opposites. Now the mindset at Medium seems to be that quality and popularity are mutually exclusive. It's like that annoying music connoisseur: 'I was a big fan of that band, until they became popular'.
Maybe thats what you want, maybe not. What you want, I think, is value for the $5. The same way for example you want value for the $10 you pay Netflix. Netflix doesnt allocate subscription dollars based on hours of viewing. So for e.g. House of Cards costs 10s of millions of dollars to produce, while a documentary might only cost a few hundred thousand, but you might derive your $10 value from the documentary rather than HoC. In the same way if Medium can create a bouquet where both the sports stats junkie and tech news enthusiasts can find value then it could become interesting. I think the challenge for them is that people have gotten so used to text content being free that most people dont want to pay.
Is he saying that subscription revenue is going to writers hand-picked by Medium editors and not driven by writers who have more readers? I don't get that approach. If anything, as a subscriber I'd want my subscription dollars to go to the writers of articles I've liked/recommended. Why are they demonizing those kinds of clicks?
Am I understanding this wrong?