Medium Membership - $5/month for an ad-free experience with premium content

Once an avid reader of Medium, I find myself no longer engaged these days and that's while it's still free! One of the big attractions for writing on Medium was the extra traffic but presumably this value will now decline with the paywall. Personally I'd much rather see a 'Pay to Follow' mechanic where I can make micro subscriptions to my favourite writers to gain exclusive content and/or early access while knowing the majority of the payment (70%?) is going to the writer. Medium felt like it had the potential to become a marketplace.. Shame really.

Really interesting. If I were @ev, I'd try to push the whole Medium idea in a podcast format — as Medium is about sharing thoughts & experiences, through words or audio. Mediumcast could be another reason for users to pay the $5 subscription.

One thing I'm a little unclear on is whether I'm paying for Medium to hire new writers and publish new material, or whether my money is going towards the authors of the articles I'm reading (like a micro-transaction system).

My suggestion to Medium... is to syndicate existing high quality paywalled content from great publications and pay them royalties based on readership rather than trying to create yet another separate publication. I'd happily pay for great writing and journalism, but the problem is it doesn't make sense to subscribe to half a dozen publications when I can only consume a handful of articles of each one every month. Comes Medium, the place where I can read premium content in a great reading experience, without advertising, and I can reward publishers by simply consuming content. Think Netflix for reading, where "Medium Originals" live alongside the big studios hits.

I think besides the subscription, the most important news in the post is that they are trying to kill the infinite feed and starting offering Human-Curated articles. "the big difference is that it’s not an endless feed. Instead, it’s a finite digest of stories, organized into sections, and updated three times a day. Topics are different from tags because they’re curated by experts in their fields and they bring the top stories directly to your homepage."

With Netflix costing $8/mo, $5 seems high to me.

I would really like to see Medium heading to the YouTube model actually. rewarding writers and so on..

Well, it looks like @ev has written a post about paid membership: https://blog.medium.com/our-appr... ... and you have to have paid membership to view it. Interesting... I like how this reinforces the idea of Medium being about quality. Somehow asking people to pay for something makes it seem more valuable. My hope is that Medium doesn't have ads and that the company will be able to pay for everything using memberships, while still offering free, and ad-free, content to users who don't pay. My only worry is that every good writer will make every story they write members-only.

Count me in.

I notice some social media influencers were smart enough to know about this on time