Dear Medium... Why Didn’t You Ask US?
Dear Medium,
You’re probably going to ignore this, but I’m writing it anyway.
It’s about all the “stuff” hitting the fan here…
First there was the post from Ev, about laying off 1/3 of your staff.
Followed by Venture Capital Murdering Medium…
And the pièce de résistance — a post from an investor, saying:
Your Investor said publishing on the Internet is broken. Publishing isn’t broken, monetizing is…
When you have 60 million monthly readers, publishing isn’t what’s broken.
It would seem that publishing is alive and well, thank you very much.
Monetizing, however — now there’s a problem.
Because what most short-sighted corporations do is use the old television broadcast model and think “golly gee, let’s slap some ads on that puppy and make some bank...”
Dinosaurs in pinstripes. Or polo shirts. Whatever. A complete and total disregard for what the users want to see, that’s what the good old advertising model is.
Advertising isn’t the only way to monetize a website.
Remember when WP was the new kid on the block?
WordPress of old looks nothing like WordPress today. In the beginning, there were two versions, like today.
WordPress.com was free for non-commercial use. WordPress.net was free for commercial use, but you had to self host. People who used WordPress.com for commercial purposes got their fingers slapped and their account shut down.
Notice both options included no money being paid to WordPress?
Well that couldn’t go on forever, could it?
One day, it was okay to use WordPress.com for commercial use.
You just had to pay a little. And voila, no install to worry about. No plugins to worry about. No technical bits to bother with. 30 second signup, as they say.
And no hosting provider to say “not our problem” when you got hacked.
Today 25% of the entire Internet is powered by Wordpress.
CNN, Forbes, Reuters, UPS, Beyonce and tons more. No more monetization problems, I’m guessing. I’m not an investor, so I don’t know their cashflow.
What I do know is they didn’t “slap banners” on their sites.
What the hell does that have to do with Medium?
I can only speak for me, but here’s some thoughts I have.
- My profile page looks like crap. I don’t get to arrange it the way a publication can. Sure, I could set up a publication — but then I wouldn’t be able to submit to publications that help me grow an audience, which sucks. I’d be happy to pay a reasonable fee to be able to lay out my profile page the way I want it to look and happily continue submitting to publications so I can grow instead of starting a publication with no readers.
- If I want to put a subscribe option on my posts, I need to go to some other provider. Why can’t I pay you for an account upgrade that includes a signup form and the ability to email my subscribers? Yes, I know that’s what publications offer, but it seems really dumb to have a publication that’s just one person. Plus, no audience. (See #1)
- We can’t promote posts here. Promoted pins are working pretty well on Pinterest. You don’t have to go all sleazeball like Facebook and remove people’s access to the audience they worked their butts off to build, but letting members promote their posts for a nominal fee to grow their audience might be better than selling our eyeballs to outside advertisers.
- Ever heard of HARO? Duh. Peter Shankman posts here. Any idea how much they make via sponsored emails? Any reason you couldn’t have a sponsored post in each of yours? Maybe you do, and I just don’t know about it. If that’s the case, why don’t I know I can pay for reach?
Sure, there would be naysayers and grumblers…
When isn’t there? Show me anything on the internet that doesn’t have someone grumbling about it. Doesn’t exist.
The cool thing about optional upgrades is that people who don’t want to pay (or can’t pay) can use the free plan. It seems to work for WordPress. They still have free accounts. But they also have “not free” accounts with upgrades that free accounts don’t have. Why don’t you?
In Ev’s original post, he said…
We set out to build a better publishing platform — one that allowed anyone to offer their stories and ideas to the world and that helped the great ones rise to the top… However, in building out this model, we realized we didn’t yet have the right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content.
People don’t pay for content.
Newspapers didn’t GET that. Now they’re dying.
Equally broken is the “slap an ad on it” model. People are sick of ads.
Publishing isn’t broken. Monetizing is. The fastest way to lose the community we have built here is to bombard us with ads like the rest of the Internet already does.
Not to be crass, but holding out coin cups and asking for coffee money hardly seems like a workable long term solution.
Course, there’s also the Wikipedia model…
Once a year, Wikipedia asks readers and members to donate to keep the place ad free. The question becomes, would people donate enough on a one-time basis as they would pay on a monthly basis for upgrades? I doubt it. Upgrades aren’t an option at Wikipedia. They are here.
You know what I haven’t seen yet? I haven’t seen the survey that asks US MEMBERS for feedback.
I love this place. I can post daily and never once have to upgrade to the new version and pray that it doesn’t break my whole damn site. All the crap that goes along with WordPress isn’t an issue here.
WordPress started out as an “easier” way to get online. Those days are gone. Self hosted WP has a lot of knobs and gears to fiddle with. You’ve done away with all that and made publishing fast and easy again.
I love WordPress, too. When I need a full site. But for blogging, man this place is fast, easy and dead simple. What you’ve built here is pretty darn cool, but make no mistake — what makes medium great is all the MEMBERS.
All the people who are writing and then sharing their posts via email, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit — we are the ones bringing more people here.
With the sheer number of us, who knows? A survey might give you more aha moments than you know what to do with. If you’re feeling brave, include a text field and read every one of them. You might be surprised.
Anyway, thanks for giving me a place to speak my mind.
I really do appreciate it…
Even if you totally ignore this. Haha.
Mic drop…
:)
Linda
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