Update on Medium’s Paid Collection Experiments
About a year ago, we began hiring people to run some collections for Medium. We deputized them as publishers and editors-in-chief of their own mini-publications on Medium, free to hire and pay (or not) their own writers and run their collections more or less by their own lights. We basically told them to go out and build the biggest audience they could, and we’d pick up the tab.
At any one time we’ve supported about 10-15 commissioned collections, accounting for fewer than 5 percent of the total posts published on the site on any given day.We had several business goals in this: diversifying the mix of stories on Medium, attracting high quality writers and posts, increasing readership, learning about how the platform really works, and anticipating how publishers might come to adopt it down the road, to name a few.
Sustainability was penciled in as well, but, since we weren’t yet seeking revenue, and since we had very little data at that point to make predictions about growth and engagement, the math was purely theoretical. Pay per view seemed like a low-risk way to get started, although we knew we’d probably be tinkering with the compensation scheme as we went along.Predictably, a few editors excelled at creating attention and building large audiences on Medium under this model, while many more failed to do so.One thing we learned: Paying for clicks is not automatically a recipe for producing scads of short, thoughtless posts. We picked editors we trusted, and we found, for the most part, they respected the site and reliably delivered high quality writing. We also learned (surprise) that high quality posts do not automatically garner attention and audience commensurate with the effort of producing them. As a result, our payment model failed to support some really terrific contributors....MORE
HT: The Awl who, not having that payment model, gets to the point much faster:
... Meanwhile, at Medium: "[S]ome people are now paid not by clicks, but by the total time spent reading in their collection—another experiment that could change as we learn what effects it has on the types of stories it helps produce, and how people find and read them."...MORE
