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.

I'm just getting a "Notify me" button on the Membership page; is this because I'm in Canada?

I signed up. I love Medium, and I like the idea of paying to support writers, not using ads. Only question is will any writer be able to monetize similar to Adsense?

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.

Count me in.

Big fan of Medium, but wish their membership model had other perks. For example, access to private events would be interesting

I'm already a member of specific publications I love (like femsplain!). Is that membership feature being retired?

Looks good! I'd like to know what the benefits for writers are going to be. That could be an interesting side of the coin to look at.

I love the intention behind this move and I'm intrigued enough to give it a try but echoing @rrhoover's thoughts: not sure what the "exclusive" stories entail? I also feel this is disadvantageous to those who can't afford a membership. Personally would prefer what Wait But Why has done by using Patreon, where the few support the many and all content is available to everyone. As patrons, we get sneak peaks and early access but not necessarily paid-only content.

So... Medium is the new NPR?

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."

I like the idea but its really unclear as to who gets what in this model. Is medium creating a paywall for other publications that are using its service as a distribution platform? Then why not just pay the publication? I'm all for supporting writers but transparency is key here.

Upon seeing the invitation, I quickly signed up. Totally agreed the media/ad model is severely broken, and am glad they are doing something different to show there is another way to build a business. It's ultimately a very similar mindset we're planning with horizonapp.co to convincing people to pay directly for the product rather than force us into an ad model.

Someone at Twitter must have forced to create a revenue stream. What's wrong in adding Ads?

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I'm a paying member. I read more and more on Medium all the time. I want them to survive

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

I like Medium and want them to succeed so maybe I'll join for that reason, but I was really expecting them to deliver a much more creative business model than pay to kill ads.

It's no surprise Medium's heading in this direction after @ev's blog post announcing a change in their business model. I'm hopeful and curious to see how its received, but it's unclear what type of content $5/mo will buy you right now. Curious to hear peoples' thoughts on this!