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Comment by tonystubblebine | Hacker News Reader

I'm Medium's CEO and I left a longer answer down below about what I think went wrong. But I also think your summary is about right. Every startup needs to choose a business model eventually and we botched the rollout of ours.

The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us. But we didn't roll it out in a way that's congruent with anything else we were doing.

Most notably, the subscription implies that we have some premium content to share. But instead of incentivizing premium content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles. Of course, that's not what we set out to do. But it's effectively what happened. I'm partly through reversing it.

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> But instead of incentivizing premium content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles.

I suspect these things, but I seldom get confirmation. My view is that Medium articles are low-effort crap that are not even worth the effort to click the link (I stopped clicking those links entirely quite a while back). I wish they'd put half the effort into the article content as they put into getting me to click.

I hope you get it turned around; this is largely a market that isn't served. Subscribing to newsletters is pretty dang expensive with anything less than a FAANG salary.

Instead of a subscription, would you pay per article? Like maybe 5 cents or 25 cents or something? Assume it's frictionless. No account with the site, no login, etc. You read the article and magically X cents is removed from your bank account. Would you do it?

That’s the opposite of what I want.

It’s directly incentivizing clickbait headline crap based on views. If I click on something and hate it I’d be annoyed I paid them anything.

Substack’s model is better. I pay for quality writing I like that deserves my attention.

Absolutely not. I finish probably 15% of the articles I encounter. I click links all the time. If that’s what I’ll pay, I’ll expect much more expertise than some random dude writing “Vue vs X” or whatever.

I’d rather pay for convenience. Like you can read all the articles but to subscribe to someone you have to be a premium user.

Basically like Spotify did it.

Like with...cryptocurrency?

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.

>>The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us.

You're touching on an Option C or perhaps option B2 here, where the supply and demand curves intersect, but much farther to the left than the current user base. Meaning there ARE enough users who are willing to pay you enough to keep going - but it's many fewer than you currently have. So you settle into a much smaller, but sustainable business. Not necessarily a bad outcome!

Question for you: Suppose that users can pay you $X (say, 5 cents) per article they read, but you are not allowed to know who they are or anything about them, they don't login at all, and you can't show them any ads. That is, it's a "pure" transaction similar to anonymously purchasing a hamburger. Is there some value of X high enough for this to be worthwhile for you? Do you think enough of your users would go for this to make it work?

I like your honest answers here. It's refreshing to hear in the tech space after a decade of wanna-be Jobs copycats. Good luck with the business.

Seems to me that a certain cost should be impressed against the publishers of the content as well, to help prevent that content mill of garbage as well as offset the potential costs to regular readers.

There’s a ton of other things you need to fix.

As a writer, seeing random people (bots?) highlight my article to death, making it essentially illegible, was a show-stopper for me.

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