@rrhoover maybe it's just me, but it's also unclear what not paying gets you. Does Medium have ads? (I used to use it daily, but must confess haven't as much in recent months but don't think I've noticed ads before). Is this in conjunction with starting to run ads for those who don't pay?

@rrhoover @ev I'm curious too. Maybe writers will be able to publish free and paid posts, and only membership users will be able to access paid content. I'm more curious how will be the payment process for writers.

@rrhoover @ev I think $5/mo is to test drop off rate / price acceptance. Idea: Lots of companies host their corporate blogs on Medium, so why not give them the ability to sponsor paid memberships to have more inclusivity on Medium Premium? It would be a tax write off for them, and it would grow Medium's premium memberships too. Win-win.

@rrhoover it's only a matter of time until the vast majority services go premium, no matter how large is the funding pocket. I'm curious to see if that's going to be enough, given that they are now crossing that "need-cash" line.. On a second note, we do not exactly know whether they ad model is profitable and well engaged enough to sustain such modification in their biz model. It sure will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

@rrhoover @ev seems like a tough business, there's so much awesome free content out there. I wish the Medium team the best with this new direction! Charging subscribers for great articles definitely helps keep Medium aligned with the customers, instead of making them the product for advertisers *edited to be less negative

@gabriel__lewis and fewer trolls?

@chrismessina @gabriel__lewis an anti-troll tool could be available on plugins marketplace :P

@andrewett @caseynewton prove it

@bentossell @caseynewton what's your venmo username?

@andrewett NSFW

@caseynewton @andrewett That's a weird venmo username

@caseynewton I'll Snapcash you

@lisadziuba @akshayspaceship Are there ads on the internet? Whaa 😜

@akshayspaceship There are ads. I am seeing Twenty20 Stock Photos ad since couple of weeks I think. Though it's aesthetics are better so it's easy to overlook and not be annoyed by it like FB ads.

@joshdance You won't be able to include ads, but certain writers will be able to charge for their stories. I'm not sure exactly what the process is though. They haven't said much about it. (source: I was invited to become one of these writers)

@nassaraf no way. they are a social content site. twitter didn't have a business model at all for many many years. there's a lot of money to be made on back-end data vending - pretty common for ad-free/pre-ad business model companies. snapchat did it for years.

@kmehrabi The runway isn't even close, but let's play along. Twitter: Rolled out ads 3 years after Series A. Total of $1.16B investment with 319M monthly active users. Medium: Rolling out $5/mo/user on "premium" 3 years after Series A. Total of $132M investment with 30M MAU. **The only interesting thing to note is that @ev knows that ads don't work, otherwise he'd have followed Twitter's lead.** Backend data only gets you so far before investors start getting pissed and want to see real revenue.

@nassaraf @kmehrabi also, what interesting "backend data" does Medium have? Yes, the content is good, and some of the preferences data is generally useful, but it doesn't have the volume or velocity of signals that a Twitter or Foursquare does. It'd be hard to turn Medium into a data business because it's not really set up that way. As @ev said a long time ago: Medium is a "platisher".

@chrismessina good question. I can only speculate since I've never worked nor consulted for them. Having said that, they have a very unique data set. 1) It's uniquely a lot of data, being one of the most trafficked print content consumption platforms out there. 2) The profound diversity of content (anything goes on medium) makes for unique insights in discovery of relational interests (as well as varying degrees of relative engagement) from user to user. Really Facebook is the only other data player that contends on that level. 3) Since the platform is specific to print content the relational discoveries are unique to print media consumption. 4) Facebook's insights aren't as 'clean' on that front (don't get me wrong, it's better in every other way) for 2 reasons: i. facebook users are often highly superficial about print content - just looking at the picture, the headline, and the social caption, then sharing/liking/whatever and moving on - not necessarily clicking on the link even ii. facebook users are bouncing from print content, to videos, to social photos, to profiles, to messaging, etc etc.

@nassaraf I appreciate those figures but they are far from the whole story. Medium is a market for longer form content than Twitter. Metrics like time spent on pages, are more critical. I'm on Twitter pretty much daily but I, like many really just scroll through my feed here and there without really engaging. Am I 'active' by those metrics, hell yeah. Does my quality of activity mean anything as a real-asset. No, of course not. At least not relative to the active Medium user. On the last comment, it really depends on your investors. And in 2017, there are far more investors out there appreciating the value of quality data, in that it far exceeds piecemeal gains like subscription fee revenue or direct early adverts. And that's great for innovation! We can thank Mr. Zuckerberg for that :)

@johnrmeese mine too! i wasn't even born yet ;)

@jordan_jackson if medium is spottify for articles. Then who will become soundcloud for articles?

@eonpilot @jordan_jackson WordPress?

@chrismessina @jordan_jackson wordpress is too slow. I lose my train of thought before I figure out all the CMS stuff. https://opensource.com/life/16/2...

@eonpilot false dichotomy i would imagine. As I don't think that the presupposition that medium is akin to Spotify is correct (my bad). I think that medium is more like SoundCloud -- good artists that can remix and improvise as they go along. Whereas spotify is more akin to the news, say bloomberg - it is more grown up and 'proffesional'.

@mbalex99 Yessssss, and git support right?

@mbalex99 whaaa...I have to bargin for svn at 6$ then. Damn it the github kramdown flavour is 1$ extra so its still 7$.....redcarpet flavour is on sale at 0.5$...now I have too many choices 😑

@jcampbell_05 This could play into a good eco-system as part of the sharing economy. Maybe people could pay their fave writers for content they like. I think @brainpicker does this, and I've been supporting her for maybe a year now. cc @ev

@nassaraf @jcampbell_05 @brainpicker @ev it would be cool if Medium skewed this towards a non-spottify-modell and more like a vinyl model. Sell 5 copies and still have coin for lunch. As opposed to spott...sell 50k copies maybe chicken noodles for you.

@jeff_ski_kinsey You want to charge 10x what you aren't willing to pay? :thinking_face:

@lauraglu Yes. The marketplace has set a norm for such services and Medium apparently failed to take this into consideration. For example, Wordpress starts at $2.99/mo and there are thousands of themes and plugins to make it valuable. Then, there is Medium. What I can charge has almost no bearing on what I will pay for a tool to facilitate a product offering. I doubt I am the only one thinking the current state of Medium doesn't warrant the premium price. But opinions are sure to vary.

@jeff_ski_kinsey The $2.99/mo is for authors on wordpress, not readers. Medium is charging readers, just like you are talking about.