(1) Paywalls.
(2) Fucked up the "Editors" or content aggregators.
The CEO won't admit the first one tho.
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
221–230 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a big part of it is that users/readers understandably feel that a bait-and-switch has happened. Because it has. I really think the whole idea of "make it free at first, monetize later" is what's broken. If the intention is ultimately to have it generate revenue, the best thing to do is set up the revenue mechanism right from the start.
Well, they can start free, get 1M users, and then try to monetize. Or they can charge up front, get zero users, and then find something else to do with their time.
Or they can make the charging process and fees very clear, and give out free trials. Or, if the funding mechanism is to be ads, include them from day 1.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly the paywall has trained me to avoid clicking on anything from medium.com… I wish it was more nuanced than that, but the reality is that the content is not essential enough to justify a subscription. The Substack model is more sustainable, but something about their incentive model or community design seems to result in impenetrable 9000 word essays. In either case, "what if blog posts cost money" is a tough b…
It sounds like you have a casual interest in longform articles. These subscription-driven publications are making their content more appealing to people who value longform enough to pay, which means the articles/emails are becoming really longform to appeal to those who like it the most.
That’s probably an accurate assessment—both of the market forces and my interest in longform. I love long reads from traditional media (eg NYT) so perhaps I just haven’t found the right Substacks for me—discovery seems to be a tricky issue in this space.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think these are not the main pain points. The biggest issue for me is that medium makes me feel like a cash cow. The way it wants me to pay every step of the way, the way it hijacks copy/paste to insert its own marketing. The account it wants me to create. The trackers it inserts everywhere. You missed the step of making something great that people actually feel good about paying for. The grassroots "for users by u…
This. I never felt recommendations were a problem. I stopped reading medium articles once everything was behind a paywall. When most content is mediocre at best, paywalls aren’t helpful.
But even if the content is good.. Annoying me with making an account and only viewing 3 random articles ensures I'll never find out how great it is. Making an account is a pretty big step if you're just consuming content.
Unless those 3 articles all happen to be amazing which is unlikely, and even then it's still a very large jump to a pricey subscription. Not everyone makes silicon valley money.
Ps not sure if it's still 3, because I haven't visited medium for about a year now.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
That implies that NYTimes is thriving after their inclusion of paywall. It's not. It's on the same path as medium and slowly over time other venues of information are (stealthily) eating its lunch. There will be a 'Why did nytimes.com "fail"?' HN post in a few years from now.
wrong. NYtimes revenue is growing after inclusion of a paywall. After initial years of decline at the start of the digital age, NYTimes finally have their revenue strategy right. It's actually the ad share of their revenue that is decreasing, while subscription is growing faster than ad share is decreasing. Print subscription is now stabilizing. So you are wrong, what the market has shown is that priced appropriately…
Revenue != Success
Priced appropriately is a key word, you're happy to pay $20/mo for 3 services but will you feel the same when it's $200/mo for 10 services?
Netflix was priced appropriately until it started getting some competition, we all see what happened there.
The irony of the entire situation is that real competition could have been medium, if they didn't fuck it up.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#226I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222 It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it: 1. Lost our way on recommen…
These aren’t the key problem.
The key problem is that you’ve lost the trust of the authors you want to attract. It’s no longer a place I can post and know that my content will be cleanly accessible to readers. I now think you’ll pepper it with pop ups and account demands.
It went from being a minimalist and trusted place to post, to now a feeling of feeding my own content into someone else’s machine and losing control of it.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#227I used to host my blog on Medium because it was the easiest way to get a simple, attractive blog available with a minimum amount of work. Then they started adding various annoyances, which I'm sure they thought would help with financial goals, but it eliminated the "simple, attractive" part. As a reader, seeing that a link went to medium.com used to mean it was easy-to-read and text-focused, and afterwards, it meant…
Do you like Svbtle?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs Isn’t the whole point that there are no golden eggs? People don’t want to pay and people don’t want ads. Where would you get income for the authors and for the platform itself?
I think there's monitization models somewhere there. Off the top of my head, you could go the email route and charge for "premium" features. Analytics, custom domains etc. Either that or it could to be run as a loss leader for some other service
The thing is there's no money in charging writers, really. There's just not enough of them, and they aren't going to pay you enough (certainly not to reach golden egg territory). You must monetize on a per reader basis if you want real revenue.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#229Not sure what HN has against wordpress, but it's still the GOAT in terms of blogging platforms. It's 1) Easy to setup 2) Incredibly SEO friendly 3) Most importantly: you own your content. Yes - it's not as technically advanced as engineers would like - but let's be real - it's a blog - not a venture funded startup. Buy your own domain. Own your content. Then, just write. If you need help, you can even get it set up f…
I stopped using (self-hosted) Wordpress because it became too much of a hassle and worry over security issues. Life is just easier without all of that.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
The New York Times's paywall is more than a decade old at this point.
Then something changed recently then as I personally never noticed an annoyance on nytimes til recent years after where it seemed any article required paywall. In addition, there is one important thing that is not being paywalled (yet), the 'news' value of nytimes is still accessible via the headline + summary on the front page. The moment the guys chasing a buck remove that is the day nytimes dies.
[deleted]