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Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#81

Post by arkades »

code4tee wrote: post #71
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…

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 ho…

While stated a bit more bluntly than I was thinking of aiming for, I think you've captured the essence of it. Medium and NYT are wildly different in their value offering, so much so that their only commonality is that they involve text on a screen. They don't really make much of a benchmark for comparison.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#82

Post by solatic »

sparkzilla wrote: post #15
ThomPete wrote: post #9

The problem is that they are trying to fix something which dont need fixing. Media is not broken, its exactly as good as it can be when so many people have access to writing whatever they want. The search for a large scale business model in media is never going to turn anything out, its not the content thats valuable but distribution.

This. Medium and most other sites-in-search-of-a-business-model (including the Register) think that content is king, and that by producing 'better' content will create more revenue. In fact, distribution is king, and getting more distribution -- independent of the content -- is the key to success. Consider a site with high distribution and crap content: It's already making money and can always improve the content. A…

> In fact, distribution is king

That's like saying that sales volume is king. If you're pushing a huge amount of product relative to competitors, you're probably doing fairly well for yourself. It's a tautological assertion.

Content is king. What you subjectively deride as "crap content", and is more commonly known as "clickbait", is actually fairly high quality content, when quality means "engineered for the maximum marketability towards the largest possible audience" rather than intellectual or insightful or inherently​ evident of intense, original journalistic effort. Remember that taste is highly subjective and it's quite possible for there to be a very large market with tastes you disagree with.

The New York Times is successful because it employs some of the best editors in the business and unifies their curation behind the NYT brand. There is quite a large market that's willing to pay top dollar for the tastes of the NYT editors/curators. If anything, the NYT's continued success is proof that there is still a market for that kind of content. What Medium is really trying to do is to scale the NYT. Which is either a farce on its face, or going to be utterly fascinating.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#83

Post by ThomPete »

solatic wrote: post #82
sparkzilla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Medium and most other sites-in-search-of-a-business-model (including the Register) think that content is king, and that by producing 'better' content will create more revenue. In fact, distribution is king, and getting more distribution -- independent of the content -- is the key to success. Consider a site with high distribution and crap content: It's already making money and can always improve the content. A…

> In fact, distribution is king That's like saying that sales volume is king. If you're pushing a huge amount of product relative to competitors, you're probably doing fairly well for yourself. It's a tautological assertion. Content is king. What you subjectively deride as "crap content", and is more commonly known as "clickbait", is actually fairly high quality content, when quality means "engineered for the maximum…

No its not like saying that. Distribution is access to volume, that distribution does not have to be have made on great content that can be made on so many other things like network, monopoly, wealth, political influence etc.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#84

Post by ttd »

jessaustin wrote: post #72
ttd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm not an expert by any means, but I think you can manually gzip your content and add rewrite rules to Apache (don't know about other servers) to use the .gz versions. I think this is the only way for compressed content to be cached by Apache, but I'd love to learn if I'm wrong here.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#85

Post by sparkzilla »

user5994461 wrote: post #39
sparkzilla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Medium and most other sites-in-search-of-a-business-model (including the Register) think that content is king, and that by producing 'better' content will create more revenue. In fact, distribution is king, and getting more distribution -- independent of the content -- is the key to success. Consider a site with high distribution and crap content: It's already making money and can always improve the content. A…

>>> A site with no distribution can't make money even if it improves its content. Inaccurate. Good content can and will self distribute. You're on the internet, your content is instantly automatically available to 1 billion people. Search engine are incredibly good at discovering niche/targeted content, a good article will be top page in a few weeks even if you have zero reader (well, until then). And good articles c…

> You're on the internet, your content is instantly automatically available to 1 billion people.

I'm surprised anyone would say this, given the realities of the media landscape. It's very, very, rare for 'good' content to get automatic distribution. Some viral content does get high exposure, but most content, especially barely-insightful commentary that is produced on Medium has very little mass appeal. When you consider that the average RPM (revenue per thousand page views) is around $1.50 or less then even an article with ten thousand views can only make $15, which is barely worth writing it.

It's also extremely difficult to rank content using search engines, as anyone who knows about SEO will testify. The market is very crowded and big content brands dominate the top positions. In short, content on the web is a commodity.

However, it's important to note that search engines are not the only form of distribution. There are many opportunities to grow an audience in new media that is coming up. For example a new provider of VR content can grow quickly, even if their content is crappy, because the distribution channel (VR hardware) is growing.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#86

Post by Alex3917 »

aleksei wrote: post #75
Alex3917 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That would defeat the entire point of the site.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#87

Post by sparkzilla »

throwanem wrote: post #26
sparkzilla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Medium and most other sites-in-search-of-a-business-model (including the Register) think that content is king, and that by producing 'better' content will create more revenue. In fact, distribution is king, and getting more distribution -- independent of the content -- is the key to success. Consider a site with high distribution and crap content: It's already making money and can always improve the content. A…

I'd hesitate to include the Register among "sites in search of a business model", when they've been doing business without interruption since before the first Silicon Valley bubble.

Yes, I should have said that even sites like The Register, that have good content and established distribution, can fail if they think that high-quality or unique content is the only reason they have survived.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#88

Post by Turing_Machine »

user5994461 wrote: post #43
sverige wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying you have to build a server to host your blog. You can host it on AWS or elsewhere if you get a lot of traffic. It's not that hard to get a domain name, host it somewhere, and write some HTML code. Yes, it could be difficult and a lot of work if you think you need embedded videos that autoplay and follow readers as they scroll down trying to escape that and the pop up pestering them to subscribe.

Hosting it somewhere on your own will not give you good analytics, a good clean theme, and a CDN. A wordpress does. You're going for a ton of extra work. AWS is madness for personal projects. You don't seem to realize how bad you're about to be bankrupt when an article hit the front HN page. If you have a high quality picture, a gif or a video, it's game over.

"You don't seem to realize how bad you're about to be bankrupt when an article hit the front HN page."

I've had a couple of AWS-hosted pages make it to the HN front page.

I don't recall my S3 bill going up to any significant degree, much less bankrupting me.

S3 bandwidth is $0.023/GB at the most expensive tier. It's hard to imagine bankruptcy resulting from any text-oriented site, even if it does hit the HN home page. Maybe if you're hosting hours of HD video or something.

Also, I've never had any trouble using CDNs from an S3 page. Details?

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#89

Post by crabasa »

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.

That's funny, I could swear I saw some ads in the magazine that I subscribed to.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#90

Post by sparkzilla »

kogepathic wrote: post #35
sparkzilla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Medium and most other sites-in-search-of-a-business-model (including the Register) think that content is king, and that by producing 'better' content will create more revenue. In fact, distribution is king, and getting more distribution -- independent of the content -- is the key to success. Consider a site with high distribution and crap content: It's already making money and can always improve the content. A…

> Consider a site with high distribution and crap content So, BuzzFeed?

Buzzfeed is a good example. It figured out that the way to distribute content on the web was to use social media to deliver clickbait headlines, listicles etc. Once it had created a distribution network based on that, and gained an audience, it could then create more 'high-quality' content, such as Buzzfeed Politics. Taken to an extreme it seems likely that large content distribution companies, most notably Facebook, will buy failing traditional content producers.

I will add that much of the "fake news" controversy is driven by old, high-quality media losing its audience/distribution to new, low-quality media. It's a futile attack though, because high-quality creators cannot grow their audience as fast as new media can make better quality content.

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