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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

#101

Post by timvdalen »

bostik wrote: post #93
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…

> 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 p…

They switched to a one-time fee of $75 last month. Did they reach out to existing users?

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#102

Post by iampliny »

Saying that Medium needs to hire writers misses the point entirely. Medium is a platform--not a publisher or a content studio. SV doesn't like the "studio" business model because it doesn't scale: there is no such thing as a 100x writer, 100x animator, or 100x video editor. If you want more output, you have to hire more people.

(I used to run a post production boutique and learned this the hard way.)

Ev Williams' previous startups (Blogger, Twitter) along with other networks like FB all rely on users producing endless streams of content FOR FREE. This seems to be working when the "content" is 140-char witticisms, cat videos, or various forms of lifestyle/status/virtue signaling. The "content producers" seem to think that the tradeoff is worth it.

The math is very different when it comes to producing thoughtful, long-form, polished content. Ev Williams hoped that he could provide writers with enough incentive to do that sort of difficult work on the Medium platform.

But even assuming that there are enough writers willing produce high-end content gratis, it is still unclear what incentives Medium is offering in exchange for moving your operations into their walled garden. A better , plus some hand-waving about the future, isn't cutting it.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#103

Post by user5994461 »

sparkzilla wrote: post #85
user5994461 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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 cons…

> 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.

My experience contradicts this. Probably because we are talking about different things.

If you look for "hotels in new york" or "how to not get fat?" or something about trump. It is indeed crowded, the search engines are already filled with "relevant" results and you cannot compete with that.

yet for every of this non sense, there are other ten expressions who are not crowded and it's very easy to rank on top.

The first means that you cannot create another useless stupid news site filled with non news and rank anywhere significantly on these topics.

The latter one means you can write about targeted topics and rank on the first page very easily on them.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#104

Post by user5994461 »

brianwawok wrote: post #41
user5994461 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you compare to the stats for wordpress?

Can't get that out of the URLs, would need to actually crawl the stories.

They can both be redirecting to a custom domain.

Actually, I think that if you accounted only for the blog on medium.com you are ignoring all the medium blogs on custom domains, which probably have better content than the average.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#105

Post by user5994461 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #88
user5994461 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bandwidth is $0.090 per GB. (You mixed it up with the storage price that is $0.023/GB).

Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver. That's nothing fancy, lots of text, css, logos, headers.

For 100k viewers, that's about 100GB of traffic, or $9 dollars.

How do you bankrupt yourself with your blog from there: By multiplying it.

1) You've got more than this single article => triple it.

2) You've got medias (picture/gif/video) that take 3MB => quadruple it.

3) My traffic stats don't account for bots/crawler => You're at the mercy of them or any dude who "ab -n 1000000 yoursite.com/logo.png"

A bill of hundreds of dollars for a personal blog might not scare a HN silicon valley engineer making $15k a month but that's much more than enough for the rest of the world. Even in western Europe, don't expect the disposable income to be much more than $100 a month.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#106

Post by user5994461 »

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.

> what would be the major bottleneck for a front-page-reaching site hosted on a raspberry pi?

For a fully static fully cachable site, it's the bandwidth.

Your home connection cannot serve Gigabytes of data in a timely fashion.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#107

Post by user5994461 »

mcbits wrote: post #79
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.

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.

A realistic static site will have multiple css, a logo, potential images in the headers/footers/sides, links to the other top read articles with icons, pictures/schemas/drawing/photos in the content.

That sets any stupid article at a 500kB bar.

I have no doubt that a HN engineer can publish a single .txt file and force gzip-9 compression, however that's not an acceptable blog by any standard.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#108

Post by user5994461 »

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...

Last I checked, compression wasn't supported by all browsers all the time. It needs to be done dynamically depending on the settings the browser allows.

nginx or varnish can do that (with more or less correct rules).

In practise, I usually disable compression everywhere and let the CDN handles it.

The CDN is configured to compress on the fly and I am very confident that CloudFlare/Akamai are doing that much better than a broken snippet of nginx settings from stack overflow.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#110

Post by nunez »

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…

What if people like that self promoting vanity posting? I mean, at least 60m people must find it useful...
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