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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

#111

Post by z3t4 »

user5994461 wrote: post #44
z3t4 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could easy have a web server with thousands of visitors running on a rasbery pi. i would say a week end project to set it up or one hour if you already are familiar with web servers.

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.

You could also reuse an old laptop, buy a proper server, rent a VPS, or buy web hosting space for a few bucks per month.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#112

Post by manigandham »

jawns wrote: post #13

This article is a pretty good take-down of Medium's business model and its future prospects. But even if you don't really care about Medium, it's actually a very strong piece otherwise, because it presents a fairly comprehensive list of the various business models that online publishers have tried over the years, along with data about how successful those strategies have been. I'm a former journalist who had to leave…

Advertorials/sponsored content work well all the time - you just happen to not notice or care as much.

The Cocainenomics article by the WSJ sponsored by Netflix is a great example. Affiliate sites like The Wire Cutter. Also pretty much every ad in popular podcasts that have hosts talk about companies they use, etc.

https://www.wsj.com/ad/cocainenomics

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#113

Post by sparkzilla »

user5994461 wrote: post #103
sparkzilla wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

The problem with niche content is that it doesn't bring a big audience and is very time intensive. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#114

Post by Turing_Machine »

user5994461 wrote: post #105
Turing_Machine wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)…

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

Correct, my fault there. I was somehow looking at the wrong chart.

"Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver"

I think your estimate of the size of a typical blog post is considerably at variance with the norm. 2-3K would be more like it. Maybe 100K with logo.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#115

Post by user5994461 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #114
user5994461 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

"Bandwidth is $0.090 per GB. (You mixed it up with the storage price that is $0.023/GB)." Correct, my fault there. I was somehow looking at the wrong chart. "Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver" I think your estimate of the size of a typical blog post is considerably at variance with the norm. 2-3K would be more like it. Maybe 100K with logo.

The HTTP headers alone to do a couple of requests are more than 4kB.

The text alone of an article can easily be more than 10kB (that's about 1500 words).

3k might have been correct in 1997 for a single standalone HTML page with only text, very little text actually, and very little formatting.

100k is doable for a very minimal site.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#116

Post by mrborgen »

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/ ?

Something like that yes, though fully integrated into Medium, and ideally with smart suggestions for which images to use/buy.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#117

Post by ritave »

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…

I recently started writing technical blog, on Medium, and I'm not "too lazy to setup a blog".

Medium provides me with things I could never achieve on my own personal website. It saves me a lot of DevOps time which I can focus on programming and actual writing. It provides me with an awesome uptime - I alone can't ever beat a flock of engineers on-call. I get a social network of readers who recommend my posts. Publications provide me with an easy way to get bigger number of readers. It's design and technical merits are outcome of years of iteration, time I would have to spend to reinvent the wheel.

It's not about being lazy, it's about having the time to actually provide good content.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#118

Post by jessaustin »

user5994461 wrote: post #108
jessaustin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

As one would expect, S3 can certainly support various browsers. It ends up being just like content negotiation, in that you have multiple representations that could be served from a particular resource, depending on what headers are sent.

I'm not sure if it's still like that, since I'm not using S3 for that right now.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#119

Post by Turing_Machine »

user5994461 wrote: post #115
Turing_Machine wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bandwidth is $0.090 per GB. (You mixed it up with the storage price that is $0.023/GB)." Correct, my fault there. I was somehow looking at the wrong chart. "Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver" I think your estimate of the size of a typical blog post is considerably at variance with the norm. 2-3K would be more like it. Maybe 100K with logo.

The HTTP headers alone to do a couple of requests are more than 4kB. The text alone of an article can easily be more than 10kB (that's about 1500 words). 3k might have been correct in 1997 for a single standalone HTML page with only text, very little text actually, and very little formatting. 100k is doable for a very minimal site.

1500 words is much longer than the norm for a blog post. The standard length for classic newspaper columns (in the U.S.) was 700-750 words, and most bloggers don't write posts anywhere near the length of a newspaper column.

By the way, are we talking about normal blog posts or are we talking about "sites"? What is a "site"? Wikipedia is a site. So is a page with nothing but "Hello, world" on it.

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