Medium asks $5 a month for nothing • Hacker News Board

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#71

Post by code4tee » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 1:54 PM UTC

BillFranklin wrote: post #60

code4tee wrote: post #42

If Medium was 5 people in a basement I'd forgive them for not quite having a business model sorted out yet. What I fail to understand is how something like Medium turns into a bloated ~150 person company that's burning VC cash like crazy with no clear path towards becoming an actual business that makes decent revenue, let alone profit. Whether it's a bubble or not is semantics but it's these sorts of 'companies' that…

They burn $50m per year and have 60m readers They need 1.4% of readers to subscribe They charge 1/3 what the NYTimes does. The NYTimes company has +$1bn revenues. They can probably get 1.4% of readers to subscribe. They could also charge subscriptions for blogger tools. They could have tiered subscriptions ($5 is the lowest guardian membership, and it looks like you get little for it). They have only just started off…

The NYTimes has some of the world's best journalists writing fantastic original content that can't be found anywhere else. People will, and do, subscribe to that.

Medium is just another place for people too lazy to setup a blog to post their crap. Most of the content stinks and is just self-promoting vanity posting. People won't pay for that. They could throw some ads up there and make a few bucks but again that's how a 5 person company (which Medium should be) is viable and makes people some money... not the bloated entity they are now.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#72

Post by jessaustin » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 1:54 PM UTC

ttd wrote: post #56

user5994461 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your raspbeery will be crushed to death when the article will go on the first page of HN. You seriously overestimate the capabilities of a raspberry and undestimate the traffic you get.

I'm curious about this. If you have a purely static site, what would be the major bottleneck for a front-page-reaching site hosted on a raspberry pi? I'm thinking things like compression would eat up a lot of its CPU, but you seem to know more about this than me.

Can't compression be done ahead of time? ISTR it worked that way when serving content directly from S3, at one point...

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#73

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 1:56 PM UTC

jitix wrote: post #5

I might be wrong but it seems that it's a good example of the bubble that people have been talking about. 1. It's a blogging site. A nice one. But that has already been done many times over. 2. If they wanted to replace publishing houses then their first focus should have been to get quality people to write articles AND pay them well. 3. Failing (2) they should have made deals with the news beareaus and newspapers wi…

You're making an assumption that they want any of that. They don't. There's no money in those ideas you just talked about.

Also, doing what publishing houses used to do but a bit better, and helping failing newspapers host their content are opposite of "disruptive". Those are obvious ideas that someone from that industry would just come up with if they wanted to make a few bucks.

I'm being harsh to make a point that anyone can criticize about someone else's idea easily, but it's a completely different story if you're actually working on it.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#74

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 1:59 PM UTC

muraiki wrote: post #62

user5994461 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is difficult, a lot of work and potentially very expensive (when you have traffic) to build your own. If you are in tech, you should understand to use the right tool for the job.

Hosting a web site for a blog is expensive? A local webhost offers 75GB of transfer for $6 a month, with the highest transfer day per month dropped completely. If you want a CDN on top of that, it's a whopping $1 per month per 10GB.

[deleted]

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#75

Post by aleksei » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 1:59 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #69

BillFranklin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They burn $50m per year and have 60m readers They need 1.4% of readers to subscribe They charge 1/3 what the NYTimes does. The NYTimes company has +$1bn revenues. They can probably get 1.4% of readers to subscribe. They could also charge subscriptions for blogger tools. They could have tiered subscriptions ($5 is the lowest guardian membership, and it looks like you get little for it). They have only just started off…

> It seems that Medium has a viable business model: ads and subscriptions. Ads and subscriptions are mutually exclusive.

No, they're not. You show ads to everyone who doesn't pay. Simple.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#76

Post by artursapek » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC

snackai wrote: post #10

eloisant wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a blogging platform. Why posts hosted there should be any less interesting than posts hosted on any other platform?

For some odd reason medium attracts the worst content. All those super optimistic shallow nonsense. Urgh.

It lets a lot of pretentious, self-absorbed people pretend they're being published in some high end magazine.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#77

Post by hyperbovine » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

code4tee wrote: post #42

If Medium was 5 people in a basement I'd forgive them for not quite having a business model sorted out yet. What I fail to understand is how something like Medium turns into a bloated ~150 person company that's burning VC cash like crazy with no clear path towards becoming an actual business that makes decent revenue, let alone profit. Whether it's a bubble or not is semantics but it's these sorts of 'companies' that…

s/Medium/Twitter/

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#78

Post by ccvannorman » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 2:04 PM UTC

"Medium is still around?"

"Wait, you can pay for Medium?"

Just for kicks I spent 5 minutes on their site and could not figure out how to pay..

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#79

Post by mcbits » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

ttd wrote: post #56

user5994461 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your raspbeery will be crushed to death when the article will go on the first page of HN. You seriously overestimate the capabilities of a raspberry and undestimate the traffic you get.

I'm curious about this. If you have a purely static site, what would be the major bottleneck for a front-page-reaching site hosted on a raspberry pi? I'm thinking things like compression would eat up a lot of its CPU, but you seem to know more about this than me.

A solid 3,000-word article with enough CSS to make the page look nice will fit comfortably in 20-30KB gzipped. A Raspberry Pi could handle on the order of tens of requests per second (tens of thousands per hour).

A fluffy 500-word Medium-style article with 1-2MB of JavaScript serving no apparent purpose and 5-10MB of animated GIFs would be another story.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#80

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

Medium is a playground for social justice warriors, shitty wannabe motivational speakers, and most importantly, people who just want attention to profit from.

It's good that nowadays there's a social network for anything, that's the beauty of the Internet and I have no problem with that, but haha why would I PAY to read that? It's like paying people to come in front of my house and protest all day every day.