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While their model can look good for writers and some readers, it's expensive in my opinion as a reader. I am not willing to pay $5 a month for Medium, but if they asked me only $1 then I would pay it.
If I would accept this tendency of charging $5 for some of the paid services in the internet, then in the end of the month I would pay more than I pay now for my mobile plan, home internet and Netflix.
So I don't mind to pay, but be more reasonable with the prices, because $1 for 10 services is $10, but at $5 each will be $50.
It all comes down to value and time imo. I was like yourself and initially thought the price of Medium was steep. As time went on I found myself getting blocked by the paywall more and more on pieces I wanted to read. This led me to believe the service was worth the price and now I pay for the subscription.
The pay wall they impose to me each time I try to read an article, just makes me hit the button to close that window, and its one of the reasons I use now DEV instead of Medium.
Hackernoon left Medium and some bloggers are doing it so... something must not be right with them.
In my case is not a question of if I can pay, its I just that think is to expensive.
Mhm, I address this sort of in the piece here saying that free content should exist and there is nothing wrong with that. Having a paywall goes two ways, pays the people who are creating value for the readers but also blocks people without the funds. Having both dev.to and Medium popular is a win for the internet :)
Just to be clear I am not against Medium paying writers with the money that comes from the paid readers, by the contrary I like it. I just don't like the price asked to me.
Maybe by charging $5 for each reader they only get
npaid readers, but if they charged $1 they may gotn x 10paid readers... just my 2 cents!!!"getting blocked by the paywall more and more on pieces I wanted to read" -> incognito
My Firefox browser is configure to no keep history after I close a tab/window, thus Medium is not showing me the paywall that often now, but anyway I am not going there that often nowadays, but I already have used incognito with them in the past.
This is a problem inherent to the aggregated subscription model, you pay for the whole bundle, not the stuff you want.
Unfortunately there is a reason ads have been so dominant as a source of income on the internet.
When I pay £8 pounds for the whole bundle of Netflix, I feel that I have a huge return for what I am paying for, despite that I only use a fraction of the bundle.
Now paying $5 dollars for Medium, just feels to pricier.
Bloggers are now starting to use the sponsor model, and the security researcher Troy Hunt was the one I came aware first. You can read more about his journey to drop ads here.
Publications in the likes of Medium must drop a lot their price model, otherwise they will reach only a fraction of the paid audience that they could potentially reach with a cheapest price model.
If they do their jobs right, they should have determined the best price point to maximize profits. You can optimize your profits or you can optimize your reach. Subscription methods don't offer both, ads do.
I'm not saying I like ads, they are bad for lots of reasons, but the reality is that they make a lot of business sense (though not for every business).
I think $5 a month for a whole bunch of head food is quite reasonable.
For Medium, I doubt I will use it since I don't read it often to justify the reason for me to do it.
Plus I would focus on just providing a weekly newsletter or other ways to get an email to allow me to send products, services or sponsorships that I believe in or use to make money indirectly.
The day after I post this, looks like Medium is changing how they distribute payments: blog.medium.com/improving-how-we-c...
Will be interesting to see if the traction sticks.
Great addition. Looks like they just launched 2.0 on ProductHunt today as well: producthunt.com/posts/buy-me-a-cof...