| After the Medium announcement in January, I've been very curious what their new direction would turn out to be. I'll be waiting to see how it plays out before judging, but this really is not what I was hoping for. It seems clear that there is a new appetite for paying to support quality content that did not exist four months ago. But I already pay for quality content that is curated by an editorial authority (The Washington Post, etc.). I'm still looking for way to support good content that is too niche for mass-market consumption. What I really want is a micropayments service that saves a record of every blog post I want to support. Then, at the end of the month, I can set my "subscription" budget and allocate it to the creator of each saved post based on the value I got from it and my desire to see the creator produce similar content. Basically I want to: 1. support content I read
2. but not blow my monthly budget by paying a fixed price per piece
3. and not support clickbait junk just because I was linked to it and read it
So from a monthly a budget of $20, a couple really good posts might get $1 or $2. NYTimes CPM is $8 (or $0.008 per ad view) [2] so even $0.05 - $0.10 for an average article beats top-end ad revenues, except for sites with highly targeted audiences (assuming no one clicks the ads, which is almost entirely the case for certain audiences that might care about high quality content).I think Flattr is supposed to work to be a little like this, but I couldn't even get it to accept my (American) credit card. Patreon is intended for larger recurring payments to creators. So as far as I know this doesn't already exists. But I really wish it did. [1] https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/selfservice/help.html |