Medium Introduces Paid Membership To A "Select Group Of Founders"
I woke up today with an interesting news. Medium, the highly popular publication platform started by Ev Williams of Twitter, is rolling out a program for paid membership / content. The monthly contribution would be $/month but it's not yet clear what this will cover. Recently, Medium was in the spotlight for some evident financial issues, which eventually forced the management to let go of about one third of their workforce.
At this moment is not very clear what this new exclusive program (only for a few chosen ones) will exactly mean for writers and readers, and it seems there are a lot of open questions, like you can see on this article:
Q & A : New Medium Membership Paywall
But there are also other members who are embracing this proposal wide open, like Charlie Gilkey (I'm a long time follower of Charlie's work):
3 Reasons I Became A Founding Member
It seems the news was badly communicated, leaving the impression of a bit of a rush. I wonder why this sounds so familiar to me, hmm...
This move, whatever direction it will take, gives at least 3 very important insights:
- advertising is a broken revenue model, it simply doesn't work anymore in a sustainable way
- if you want content quality, as a reader, you have to pay
- if you want higher exposure, as an author, you have to pay
Medium proves what Steemit is preaching: we already live in an attention economy and there is a lot of room for real transactions taking place between content creators and consumers. "Free content" was never free, anyways.
I'm particularly interested in this decision, because of my little experiment, in which I'm bypassing the reward pool for a certain type of articles, relying only on direct contribution from my readers (all this followed by a redistribution of whatever I get from them). The rewards model I'm working on, a revised version of YAVAP, may find its place somewhere in the middle of a "tipping only" platform (which Medium looks like now) and "money for nothing and the chicks for free" platform, as Steemit still is.
The middle way, folks, always look for the middle way.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
More like, "Steem/Steem Dollars/Steem Power for nothing and the Fraggle Downvote for free"
But it would never make a good song title;D~ Rock on Bro.
I think that is too early to say. I indeed think that from just plain push advertising, and directly-in-your-face-but-didn't-ask-for-it advertising, this may become the case since people are getting more an more annoyed. But brand communicating and interacting with their audience who actually choose to and want to follow and/or interact with their brand, I certainly believe there will be a growing market for. Such (optin) interaction is in principle also advertising. FB and the likes are in my view, Push advertising, although when liking a page, that type of advertising than become chosen advertising (the optin model). Although not having figures at hand, I think the annoyance is in the push advertising not chosen for by the user.
I agree to that. In the Netherlands we have a startup of a new digital newspaper, who spend more time in researching for articles and therefore can bring more depth into it. They try to look at topics from multiple angles, so they are not that too one-sided. You can only read those articles when being a member and costs around 60 Euro/year. They have in my book MAJOR success. I think they have something like 50.000 payers already. More and more quality journalist are working for them fulltime as well as parttime or as guest writers. But they are THE example to me that journalism can still work, and that people want to pay for quality content.
Yes and no, depends what model you work in, I mean, it may not need to be the author who pays, it can also be an umbrella company, or community of writers that pays and each member gets an equal exposure, ie the digital newspaper I was talking about we have in the Netherlands. But yes, in general the rule seems to be indeed that when you want to get more exposure you have to pay. But keep in mind that this rule is per definition Advertisement. So be very careful with the first statement you made "advertising is a broken revenue model, it simply doesn't work anymore in a sustainable way" because when someone pays, someone earns, and when some earns, there must be a business model otherwise the service is not offered.
the key word here is "in a sustainable way". It's more and more difficult to predict advertising revenues. As you said, communities with added value (like peer reviewing articles, etc) are the future.
What's the name of that startup in Netherlands?
"De Correspondent", they started with Dutch articles only, and now also do English, I think mostly translated.
Thanks!
Nice post with very interesting news
Hello @dragosroua! The material is interesting and clearly structured, I'll keep reading your posts.
I'm not posting on Medium from a while.
I do it every once in a while, looking forward to see how this new payment thing will affect readership and exposure.