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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

#31

Post by user5994461 »

fhoffa wrote: post #19
snackai wrote: post #3

When I see a nice Headline on HN: "Oh cool, I would love to read that", then I look at the domain: "Oh it's on medium. Never mind then." I'd never pay for that shit show.

Facts: Hacker News gets a ton of articles posted from Medium, but very few of them get to the front page. Last time I measured there had been 4,108 posts from medium.com in 2017 (largest source of news for HN), but less than 3% of them got some upvote traction. So you seem to be sharing a similar sentiment towards Medium than the rest of the HN readers. (Even posting tweets to HN gets them double the attention than a…

Can you compare to the stats for wordpress?

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#32

Post by z3t4 »

sverige wrote: post #23
hdra wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't feel as strongly about Medium as the parent comment, I'm also less inclined to read an article when it is posted on Medium. No real reason, really, just a personal bias from myself because I'm finding a lot of "thought-leader-pieces" articles over there, and technical content over there are not as well formatted as the ones on someone's personal blog that are well designed for code snippets and such in…

> it has become the go-to site for tech musings written by unpaid people who can't be bothered to set up their own blogs. This is it for me. If you want to write about tech, or the tech scene, and especially web tech, why can't you just build a site? I've built a few and I don't even do web development for a living so I had to teach myself some stuff.

even worse i have seen web devs using png tables instead of html tables or svg. have publishing web content become too hard ?

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#33

Post by Zwitty »

montycantsin wrote: post #27

Donations aren't really anything new. "Pure Silicon Valley" is thinking that all transactions need to be for something. Unrelated to that, Medium doesn't even work in Safari on the latest macOS, so it's hard to call it anything more than a shitshow.

Safari is the new IE

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#34

Post by onion2k »

rileymat2 wrote: post #25

There is a lot of trashing the idea, probably rightly, but it sounds a lot like NPR, PBS, WIKIPEDIA taking what amounts to donations. Not as unusual as the article paints it, except for being for profit.

Exactly. You aren't getting "nothing" for your money. You're contributing to the continued existence of something you want to continue existing.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#35

Post by kogepathic »

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…

> Consider a site with high distribution and crap content

So, BuzzFeed?

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#36

Post by z3t4 »

user5994461 wrote: post #30
sverige wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has become the go-to site for tech musings written by unpaid people who can't be bothered to set up their own blogs. This is it for me. If you want to write about tech, or the tech scene, and especially web tech, why can't you just build a site? I've built a few and I don't even do web development for a living so I had to teach myself some stuff.

Because it is difficult, a lot of work and potentially very expensive (when you have traffic) to build your own. If you are in tech, you should understand to use the right tool for the job.

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.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#37

Post by kogepathic »

mrborgen wrote: post #12
alex_hirner wrote: post #2

I would pay a few bucks to have my articles proof read and for stylistic enhancements. How much this producer centric model would yield is another question...

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/ ?

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#38

Post by sverige »

user5994461 wrote: post #30
sverige wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has become the go-to site for tech musings written by unpaid people who can't be bothered to set up their own blogs. This is it for me. If you want to write about tech, or the tech scene, and especially web tech, why can't you just build a site? I've built a few and I don't even do web development for a living so I had to teach myself some stuff.

Because it is difficult, a lot of work and potentially very expensive (when you have traffic) to build your own. If you are in tech, you should understand to use the right tool for the job.

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.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#39

Post by user5994461 »

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…

>>> 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 can and will be tweeted, HN, reddited to many thousands of people.

Maybe I should write a medium blog post about that :D

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#40

Post by H4CK3RM4N »

Zwitty wrote: post #33
montycantsin wrote: post #27

Donations aren't really anything new. "Pure Silicon Valley" is thinking that all transactions need to be for something. Unrelated to that, Medium doesn't even work in Safari on the latest macOS, so it's hard to call it anything more than a shitshow.

Safari is the new IE

But Safari is still WebKit. The only real problems I have with Safari are with Flash content(eww).
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