Agreed, I think this deserves recognition. This is not the fake self promotion disguised as “brutal honesty” you see in the corporate word, there are actual admissions here that go beyond that, which leads even a cynic like me to take this seriously.
It’s also important to understand that a lot of people will never pay for or be happy with the paywall content model, especially for articles. So even a success in this domain would be hated by a lot of people.
Those of us who personally wouldn’t pay for articles aren’t the target audience anyway, and that’s ok. I think throwing rocks at paywalls is a stupid thing to do, especially when the only alternative is ad-tech. I’d rather have competing business models than not.
What doesn’t make sense to me, is that opaque clickbait recommendation engines AND paywall made itself to the same platform. This seems odd, because usually the former is a plague of ad-tech. Perhaps this is the result of cargo-culting from employees who came from ad-tech mindlessly replicating these patterns even where they don’t make sense.
It is still corporate speak. He has posted similar before and been told that the paywall and forced reg is the issue. Then he comes back, doesn’t acknowledge it and gets told the same again. That is not genuine engagement.
The people who hate the paywall above all aren't customers, and frankly, being more concerned about that than whether the content behind it is worthwhile at all seems mixed up. I cant blame him for not prioritizing those things - I personally care way more about whether or not clicking a medium link is likely to lead me to something relevant, the rest can be negotiated.
Customers are the end of a funnel that starts with non-customers/visitors.
if visitors numbers are shrinking you get no new customers.
add to that the risk of other platforms trying to get away your existing users:
- substack: both writers and readers
- hashnode: targeting writters and readers from tech
- dev.to: the same as hashnode
- mastodon: longer posts and with elk and others better syntax
- ghost : writers and readers
and many more.
so not paying attention to the base of the funnel is very costly in the long run: and this is what happened to Medium = ignored the base of the funnel (the free users) for a long period and focused on short term goals/income
Why should you, I, or anyone else care when that part of the audience is solely concerned with how to make the experience bearable for free at the expense of making it genuinely worthwhile? Its not a coherent position.
Medium is trying to be a two-sided marketplace. In any such marketplace, the producers want the audience to be as big as possible, and the consumers want the inventory to be as big as possible. Neither cares about Medium making a profit, except to the extent it incidentally furthers their own goals.
To succeed, either they monetize the transaction as a middleman (e.g. ads when transactions don't involve the exchange of money), or they figure out how to establish a direct financial relationship with the producers and/or consumers (like Costco's annual fee).
Medium has chosen a pathological route of using the two-sided marketplace principally to advertise a fee for their own product. (Yes, "principally" is fair. I believe their conversion rate is low, so the vast majority of impressions represent potential members of the two-sided marketplace that they're OK turning away, even though that frustrates both the producers who wanted the audience to grow, and the consumers who wanted to read the article.)
The fact that they can't figure out a better way to make money than to turn away customers is not my problem. There are plenty of other places for me to read or publish content that have figured out how to be sustainable operations.
My personal viewpoint is that Medium is in a death spiral. If their paywall is abrasive, which I think it is, then I won't join, because I would question which content publishers would be OK being behind an abrasive paywall. Medium's real offer to me -- that they're where to find content from publishers I like -- has failed. That was their one and only job from my perspective. They failed.
Oh, I don't feel like I"m ignoring that, sorry. The regwall is a bit confusing to me personally because we don't have one anymore. People here seem to have a long memory about a time when maybe there was a regwall dark pattern. But I never saw it because I was always logged in during that period and nobody who worked on it is still at the company.
But the paywall, i.e. the metered paywall where some articles are behind a paywall by author choice and an unsusbcribed reader can read three of those a month, is up there. And I'm just coming at it from the opposite side. Many people here don't want to see a paywall. That's fine. But I'd like to see their reaction if the quality of what was behind it changed. A no might still be a no, but I think the tenor would change. So that's how my original take on fix quality first fits into the anti-paywall headline of other people. This model works well enough for us in the worst possible implementation that I believe it will work all the way if we have a better implementation, especially if there is more of a sense of that there's at least something valuable behind it.
How would you do it differently, assuming the same fundamental business model - ie charging users for content. If you don’t run ads, then you have to paywall, no? And if you paywall, you have to register.
Isn’t this the same as how Patreon works? I’m not too familiar with these services, but genuinely curious.
Either way, this still gets to the heart of Mediums problem. Why have a conversation about tweaking the recommendation system when there is this elephant in the room about gating content?
If charging for content is their business model then it's fundamentally flawed in my opinion. Why would people give away high quality content and let medium charge for it? It looks like they do have some revenue share programme, but Substack offer a simple and transparent 90% payment in your favour.
It’s also important to understand that a lot of people will never pay for or be happy with the paywall content model, especially for articles. So even a success in this domain would be hated by a lot of people.
Those of us who personally wouldn’t pay for articles aren’t the target audience anyway, and that’s ok. I think throwing rocks at paywalls is a stupid thing to do, especially when the only alternative is ad-tech. I’d rather have competing business models than not.
What doesn’t make sense to me, is that opaque clickbait recommendation engines AND paywall made itself to the same platform. This seems odd, because usually the former is a plague of ad-tech. Perhaps this is the result of cargo-culting from employees who came from ad-tech mindlessly replicating these patterns even where they don’t make sense.