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  1. You must read the article before you can comment on it.
    • jeff3 years ago

      I was going to say "Of course, this is how it should work everywhere! (minus the unknown clap factor)", but that's only because I was thinking about Readup's concept of time spent reading an article to completion. The Medium model is one of "interaction time" plus additional factors. Makes sense if you want to support reading comics and cartoons as they point out but they don't even seem to factor in the concept of article completion. They even seem to imply that skimming a long article counts towards their "reading time" metric.

      All that said, it's still a huge step up from just looking at claps! The bigger issue is that Medium is just another publisher with a walled garden of hard-paywalled content (writers do not get paid for freely-available articles). Publishing on the web has been federated since day one. That's what the web is. We need a monetization model that fits that federated structure. That's what Readup is going to be.

      • thorgalle
        Top reader this weekScoutScribe
        3 years ago

        Publishing on the web has been federated since day one. That's what the web is. We need a monetization model that fits that federated structure. That's what Readup is going to be.

        🙌 👍 🚀

        The bigger issue is that Medium is just another publisher with a walled garden of hard-paywalled content (writers do not get paid for freely-available articles).

        I don't think that's entirely accurate. See this help page, quote:

        The vast majority of people will be able to read your story for free even if it is part of the metered paywall. Any Medium reader who is either a member or has not yet read their allotment of free stories for the month will access your story completely free (and without ads). Over 90 million people read Medium per month, and the overwhelming majority never reach their monthly limit.

        1. Update (2/26/2021):

          Publishing on the web has been federated since day one. That's what the web is. We need a monetization model that fits that federated structure. That's what Readup is going to be.

          Quoting this again, because it's so good. Even without the monetization angle, this is a unique value point of Readup. This makes it different from Medium and from Substack. On Readup, I can read web pages which would traditionally not be considered articles. For example, a dictionary.com "Memes Dictionary" entry. Dictionary.com will most likely never publish short meme histories on Substack or Medium. But they do constitute (a bit of) reading. Readup really is social reading on the web, the whole web! I really hope Readup can keep that property.

        2. Update (2/26/2021):
        • jeff3 years ago

          I don't think that's entirely accurate.

          Good catch! I was going off of this article: A 100% transparent look at my first Medium paycheck. An interesting read. His traffic numbers seem to indicate that paywalling an article has a much more dramatic effect on views/reads than the help page statement you quoted seems to imply. Also just to clarify:

          • Medium has no "hard" paywall at all. Just the metered paywall which can be bypassed by clearing your cookies which I think makes it a "soft" or maybe "medium" (ha!) paywall.
          • Writers don't get paid for any "free reads", either from freely available articles (even if read by paying readers) or metered paywalled articles read by non-paying readers. Writers only get paid when paying readers read (or "interact" with) a metered paywalled article.

          Right?

          I should also correct myself for saying that Medium is "just another publisher." Clearly they are quite different from traditional publishers and offer writers an interesting alternative outlet. What I meant was that from the perspective of a reader, at least from my perspective, it's just yet another subscription to consider. I've read some great articles on Medium but if I were going to start subscribing to every publisher that offered subscriptions I don't think they'd make my top 10. I'd like to run some queries to see what my top publishers actually are!

          Quoting this again, because it's so good.

          Love that it resonates with you, but it's also total techno-wonk language. Trying to communicate it at a marketing level is the real challenge since I don't think it's just a matter of translation or explanation, but rather illustrating the value inherent in such a system.

    • Alexa3 years ago

      I couldn't get over the math on this, maybe I did it wrong but that would average out to $200 a writer. Knowing some people make more, that means most people are making diddly squat, no?

      But of course, interesting to see all the factors behind their particular algorithm. I subscribed for a while, but ended up burning time on articles "just because". There is no good space to chat about what you read, esp on feminist articles the comments are often a hot garbage troll fest. It's a read-only space to me.

    • Pegeen
      Top reader this weekReading streakScoutScribe
      3 years ago

      Is Medium ad free?

      • jeff3 years ago

        Yup!

    • Raven3 years ago

      Time for Launch ! 🚀

    • Florian3 years ago

      Bill, you seeing this?