| Ads + Writing worked just fine for most of the last century when print was the only option. The dead elephant in the room is the fact that the online ad experience is the most irritating and least useful ad experience in all of history. I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing. The ads are completely useless to me, because I'm no longer interested in buying A Certain Thing. The ads are useless for the advertiser, because they're paying for nothing. And the ads themselves are usually animated and irritating anyway. Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting. The online ad industry has never understood the difference between adding value to readers and repeatedly smacking them around the head in a misguided attempt to force them to click the BUY NOW button. Medium missed the point of all this. The content varies from outstanding to not so good, the design is great. But it's a bit late to be thinking about monetisation, because now it's just replaying the mistakes made by every other media platform over the last decade and a half. |
Yeah Google ads are awful now. The best bang for your bank, ads wise? Facebook and Super Bowl commercials.
> Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.
When was the last time you purchased a product with print ads? I used to subscribe to a ton of magazines a little over a decade ago but cancelled them all because for every 1-2 articles of content there were 3-4 ads. It got to the point where I could finish a magazine, cover to cover, in minutes because of how many ads were in there.