Medium asks $5 a month for nothing
This article is a pretty good take-down of Medium&#x27;s business model and its future prospects.<p>But even if you don&#x27;t really care about Medium, it&#x27;s actually a very strong piece otherwise, because it presents a fairly comprehensive list of the various business models that online publishers have tried over the years, along with data about how successful those strategies have been.<p>I&#x27;m a former journalist who had to leave the industry not because I didn&#x27;t care for journalism anymore, but because newspapers lost their business model, and the industry remains a shadow of its former self.<p>Among the business models the article describes:<p>- Ad-funded.  When it doesn&#x27;t work well: General interest news orgs, such as your daily metro newspaper.  The bulk of their ad revenue continues to come from print advertising, and digital advertising has little chance of every pulling in comparable revenue.  When it works well: &quot;We cover a specific niche; we dig in a little deeper; we tend to know what we&#x27;re talking about; we&#x27;re independently owned and thus have no corporate investors to please.&quot;<p>- Subscription.  When it doesn&#x27;t work well: Historically, people have been reluctant to pay for what they thought they could get for free.  When it does work well: &quot;Big respected names with huge resources that have hit on a specific model: offer a few free articles a month and then prompt for subscription. It has finally started working after a decade of hard times.  In part thanks to the election of Donald Trump, these news organizations have seen their subscriber levels jump. ... it seems that, psychologically, people are getting used to the idea again of paying for content. It&#x27;s like a switch. And once you pay for Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime, it seems perfectly reasonable to pay for quality news.&quot;<p>- Guilt.  When it doesn&#x27;t work well: The Guardian has tried a variation of this -- &quot;If you use it, if you like it, then why not pay for it? It&#x27;s only fair.&quot; -- and the results have been terrible.  When it does work well: Wikipedia&#x27;s donation drives tend to pull in a ton of cash, but it&#x27;s a nonprofit.<p>- Advertorials.  When it doesn&#x27;t work well: In Business Insider&#x27;s case, &quot;you literally sell yourself to companies. We predict this will end in misery sooner rather than later.&quot;  When it does work well: Hmm, I don&#x27;t think it ever does.<p>And then there are the various compensation models for the content producers:<p>- Pay professional journalists a decent salary, and don&#x27;t hinge their pay on page views.  It&#x27;s the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for: Quality, in-depth journalism.<p>- Pay professional journalists (or unprofessional bloggers) according to their number of page views.  This tends to lead to &quot;junk journalism that a hit-based reward model encourages.&quot;<p>- Don&#x27;t pay your bloggers at all.  It&#x27;s the least expensive option, but again, you get what you pay for.