There is a huge difference between the NYTimes and Medium. For readers, the content on Medium is fungible: if it goes away today, it's easily replaceable by the 100 other user driven sites like it. I'm not saying that the content on Medium is bad, but it's easily replaceable.
The NYTimes provides a level of journalism that is not easily replaceable by letting a bunch of random people blog. That's why their subscription works. True there are other journalism sites. But there are also many actors, but only one Tom Cruise; the NYTimes is like Tom Cruise, which is why he is paid so much. Medium is more like an unknown actor that is good but there are 100 waiting to replace him.
The best of Medium is better than the best of the NYTimes and isn’t fungible at all. That’s not refuting what you see. To get those gems you see too many me too articles. You are right.
This is delusional, the best of Medium isn’t exclusive to Medium. The New York Times has over 150 years of reputation built on quality, and its content is available no where else. Medium has a loose collective of bloggers who can easily migrate to a different platform with no requirements on the quality of the content they produce. If you want to compare yourself to the NYT it’s not enough to have a few good articles, every article has to be held to the highest standards of trust and the vast majority must be exclusive.
You probably think too highly of the times. They have access though more than quality. They are the official communication channel of the US government and that alone makes them unique and important. It’s comparable to a subscription to a standards library or government code book
That’s going too far. The NYTimes is playing a different game in a different league and a comparison is not apt.
I have read really interesting material on Medium and it’s just not enough to make me want to pay to read _any_ content on Medium. I might pay to remove ads like I do on YouTube but only after developing a habit that is triggered by content I care enough about and visit often enough for the ads experience to detract from it.
In my experience Medium should have been (could still be?) a Wordpress killer and not a publishing play.
That is a good point...if you had some way of putting this amazing content at the top, then Medium would have a chance. In that regard I think Medium has the same problem as Soureforge.
I've seen tons of medium articles and to me it always seemed like random ranting and a pulpit for leftists, rather than a serious platform. I hope you can do something about it.
Perhaps something like the Top 2/5/whatever medium articles a day/week are absolutely free to everyone - a taste. And then if you subscribe you get a larger amount of similarly good articles right below.
I’ll admit I don’t bother with the NYT or Medium or Subspace, but if I ever were to subscribe it’d be along those lines.
Even if that were true, it doesn’t matter. The NYT is THE NYT and Medium is just another Quora/Pinterest/rando website.
Medium has not earned the right to paywall content, the NYT has, apparently.
You need to find another way.
Maybe a pay by the drink subscription model.
Put a button on each article so I can decide how much I want to pay, with zero as an option.
Put a little counter at the top so I can see how much I’ve spent this month and how much has gone to authors vs the company.
If the content is that good, people will pay, I know I would. But I ain’t paying monthly for something I don’t use regularly and I ain’t paying to read something based on a title.
I subscribe to the New York Times because I want to support the journalists who write for the New York Times. I don't want to pay some intermediary.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding where the money for Medium's paywall goes and you've actually been giving the vast majority of subscription revenue to the writers this whole time—but that wasn't obvious to me.
I don’t think this will work out for a site that’s based on user-generated content. What would work is require payment for power-user features. But not for content.
They're not very successful are they? I mean it's a famous paper but are they really succeeding at monetizing their site this way?
I often get linked to a NYT article but as I don't even live in the US I'd never be tempted to pay for it. If I couldn't just use a paywall blocker or archive.is I'd just ignore them altogether. I kinda doubt they get many subscribers from outside their native area (US as they have a bigger reach than just new York)
I think the guardian does this a lot better, they don't paywall but ask for a contribution even if you don't subscribe. I've actually contributed a few times there.
Medium is not the NYT. They have a hundred years of reputation as one of the best newspapers in the world to build a subscription model from. People want them to survive.
Medium.com used to have a good reputation. But it never had anything like the NYT's and right now the only reputation you have is "hot garbage cash grab". Most people want your service to die. I know I did, before reading your responses here at least.
Sorry to be blunt, and I wish you luck in digging back out of that. But I would gently suggest that looking to the NYT as your shining success story is... Well I think there's a parable to match this but it escapes me now. Like an ant looking at an elephant maybe.
Is that the inclusive of the games? I used to pay them for access to the crosswords (they really are the best, but couldn't care less about their "journalism"), and as far as I knew that's under the same umbrella.
Of course, that was before I found out that canceling requires talking to an AOL-like retention droid rather than just clicking a button, and that's when they stopped getting my money permanently.
This is my impression as well, about NYT's business.
The "internet person" knee jerk response about paywalls, does have a certain degree of truth about relevance of journalism though, but that's a longer term loss of a commons rather than a business model issue, at least right now.
Soft paywalls often allow you to read a few articles when you click through to google, but then you share an article with someone who's wrong on the internet. And you end up looking like a ding-a-ling because a paywall is presented when the user opens the article url directly with no google referrer, and no normal person is going to google an article to be allow to read an opposing view.
Essentially, it's a shame that the open web business model didn't work for 'real' journalism, because there's plenty of dogshit-tier content to happily take its place.
Here in Finland, public service broadcaster Yle has been a good source for good information in text form, but the media industry has fought tooth and nail to try and impose limits like Yle only being allowed to publish certain types of longer-form journalistic text, like investigations when enough rich media is included.
I can appreciate the argument about public service distorting the market in this case, but I'm really worried about the local information that's going to be available sans paywall on search engines in the long run with these restrictions.
It's unclear how big the impact of the above is going to be, but remember, this is a small market, too. Especially if Yle's budgets are slashed to allow less longer-form journalism that qualifies for web publishing with the rules, it might get hairy.
I've been thinking about something related to internet paywalls.
In the old print model, you paid for up-to-date news on whatever topic. If you didn't want to pay for that, the news was available to you anyway, just slower. Your friend subscribes to a magazine and you can read it once she's done with it. There's a newspaper in the break room, usually 2-3 days behind today. Which newspaper it is varies.
Internet paywalls seem to place more emphasis on restricting their content permanently. Subscriber content goes to subscribers, and non-subscribers aren't supposed to see it.
I suspect that the availability-with-delay model of the older system generated a lot of influence for the content that permanent locks don't generate. If you can't afford a subscription to Seventeen, you might still care what it says because you can follow it anyway. If you can't follow it, it's a short step to not caring what it says.
It won't happen over night, of course there will be a temporary boost in revenue when one decides to force everyone that visits the site to pay.
How much of that is from existing NYTimes subscribers, marketing tactics (eg. wordle), shady subscription offer deals, forgotten subscriptions, and lack of suitable competition.
Over time though that withers and once that withering starts, nothing brings it back.
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.
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, people will pay for high quality content. Personally I am proof. I pay for both Nytimes, WaPo, and the athletic, and together they cost less than $20/mo
Netflix revenue has started to decline and as they start increasing their pricing and removing shows to save a buck, more and more users will leave, it's already happening, just not reflected on the charts yet due to the aforementioned stopping shared accounts.
