Medium – Welcome to the internet’s first open paywall

medium.com

25 points·sgmccli··8 comments

$5 is not a sustainable amount of money. It just isn't. I don't know why people in this space keep coming back to this ruinously low rate.

Charge. More. Or. This. Will. Fail. Too.

Sincerely,

(theoretically) a competitor.

I guess the question is whether they get would enough people to pay if they charge more.

As a side ponder - I wonder how many businesses are killed by bad price-points.

I can't believe there is not an ICO in there somewhere.

Check the client-side JavaScript just to be sure. ;)

They're being tricky about how payments are computed.

Lots of black-box mumbo jumbo about "engagement" and "reading time" and "claps", but nothing specific or concrete.

If 2 million members pay $5 each per month, that's $10M. Does Medium keep 10% for themselves and distribute the rest to authors?

Or do they keep 70% for themselves?

If I'm going to put my content behind a paywall, I deserve some idea of how the revenue is shared between me and the platform.

> They're being tricky about how payments are computed.

I would be too. I imagine it will be proportional to views and time-on-page. Being too specific will encourage automation.

Disclosure: I have on-again, off-again worked on pretty much the same concept for several years. As have several others.

Does anyone on HN pay for medium? What content on the site encouraged you to do so?

It seems to claim that you can publish stories behind the paywall without putting them on medium's (imo horrible) platform, but it doesn't say how you do that.

Also, this is certainly not the first attempt to do this.

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