Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 121 posts

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#91

Post by ThomPete »

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…

If they were, they wouldn't need to be find a model they would be profitable.

This is one of the secrets of how to make money on media IMO you need very little overhead.

Maria Popova from https://www.brainpickings.org/ is making more than a $1M a year with her model.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#92

Post by leereeves »

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…

Medium has some great content from techies "too lazy to setup a blog".

If the money went to these authors, it might be worthwhile to subscribe.

But if the money just goes to the blog platform du jour, no.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#93

Post by bostik »

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…

> They need 1.4% of readers to subscribe

Or they could start charging a reasonable yearly fee for custom domains. Our tech blog is hosted on medium, we have a custom domain (https://smarketshq.com/) and I'm pretty sure we wouldn't mind a couple of hundred a year for the reasonably good user experience.

Writing with their tools is not bad (although I would like the feature to automatically readjust paragraphs when pasting short plaintext lines), and submitting to a publication is easy. Turning low-friction workflow into a business case shouldn't be that much of an outlier.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#94

Post by Alex3917 »

crabasa wrote: post #89
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.

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

Yes, probably because, unlike Medium, the stated goal of those magazines isn't to create a space for non ad-supported content.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#96

Post by BillFranklin »

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…

Well, your point is subjective: NYTimes is best and Medium is worst.

Yet, if at least 1.4% of their 60m readers disagree with you then it can be a sustainable business.

I'm not sure I understand why you care that they have 150 employees. Both Medium and Stack Overflow think at least 150 people is needed to monetize their sites, yet you only dislike one of those businesses.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#99

Post by alex_hirner »

kogepathic wrote: post #37
mrborgen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting angle, charge the creators instead of the consumers. I'm writing from time to time on Medium myself, and could have paid for that as well. I've also sometimes paid for images for my articles. If Medium made is super easy (and cheap) to find and buy images for an article, I'd use it. Have no idea if these revenue streams could scale to the degree Medium needs, though.

> If Medium made is super easy (and cheap) to find and buy images for an article, I'd use it. Like https://500px.com/ ?

I think the trick would be to suggest suitable pictures per paragraph based on NLP. If to take the highest rated content, there would already be a (biased) learning set available.
Post reply on HN