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How To Make Money From Your Software Blog Without Hosting Ads 💸

Alec Brunelle on October 21, 2019

Want more great content like this? Sign up for my newsletter, visit: alec.coffee/signup We all know advertising sucks, but when it comes to writ...
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exadra37 profile image
Paulo Renato

Their revenue model is simple, readers pay \$5 a month, and while interacting with content, funds get distributed to the pieces they interact with.

While their model can look good for writers and some readers, it's expensive in my opinion as a reader. I am not willing to pay $5 a month for Medium, but if they asked me only $1 then I would pay it.

If I would accept this tendency of charging $5 for some of the paid services in the internet, then in the end of the month I would pay more than I pay now for my mobile plan, home internet and Netflix.

So I don't mind to pay, but be more reasonable with the prices, because $1 for 10 services is $10, but at $5 each will be $50.

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Alec Brunelle

It all comes down to value and time imo. I was like yourself and initially thought the price of Medium was steep. As time went on I found myself getting blocked by the paywall more and more on pieces I wanted to read. This led me to believe the service was worth the price and now I pay for the subscription.

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exadra37 profile image
Paulo Renato • Edited

The pay wall they impose to me each time I try to read an article, just makes me hit the button to close that window, and its one of the reasons I use now DEV instead of Medium.

Hackernoon left Medium and some bloggers are doing it so... something must not be right with them.

In my case is not a question of if I can pay, its I just that think is to expensive.

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Alec Brunelle

Mhm, I address this sort of in the piece here saying that free content should exist and there is nothing wrong with that. Having a paywall goes two ways, pays the people who are creating value for the readers but also blocks people without the funds. Having both dev.to and Medium popular is a win for the internet :)

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exadra37 profile image
Paulo Renato • Edited

Having a paywall goes two ways, pays the people who are creating value for the readers but also blocks people without the funds.

Just to be clear I am not against Medium paying writers with the money that comes from the paid readers, by the contrary I like it. I just don't like the price asked to me.

Maybe by charging $5 for each reader they only get n paid readers, but if they charged $1 they may got n x 10 paid readers... just my 2 cents!!!

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Nucu Labs

"getting blocked by the paywall more and more on pieces I wanted to read" -> incognito

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exadra37 profile image
Paulo Renato

My Firefox browser is configure to no keep history after I close a tab/window, thus Medium is not showing me the paywall that often now, but anyway I am not going there that often nowadays, but I already have used incognito with them in the past.

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DrBearhands

This is a problem inherent to the aggregated subscription model, you pay for the whole bundle, not the stuff you want.
Unfortunately there is a reason ads have been so dominant as a source of income on the internet.

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exadra37 profile image
Paulo Renato

When I pay £8 pounds for the whole bundle of Netflix, I feel that I have a huge return for what I am paying for, despite that I only use a fraction of the bundle.

Now paying $5 dollars for Medium, just feels to pricier.

Unfortunately there is a reason ads have been so dominant as a source of income on the internet.

Bloggers are now starting to use the sponsor model, and the security researcher Troy Hunt was the one I came aware first. You can read more about his journey to drop ads here.

Publications in the likes of Medium must drop a lot their price model, otherwise they will reach only a fraction of the paid audience that they could potentially reach with a cheapest price model.

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DrBearhands

If they do their jobs right, they should have determined the best price point to maximize profits. You can optimize your profits or you can optimize your reach. Subscription methods don't offer both, ads do.

I'm not saying I like ads, they are bad for lots of reasons, but the reality is that they make a lot of business sense (though not for every business).

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Compucademy

I think $5 a month for a whole bunch of head food is quite reasonable.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

For Medium, I doubt I will use it since I don't read it often to justify the reason for me to do it.

Plus I would focus on just providing a weekly newsletter or other ways to get an email to allow me to send products, services or sponsorships that I believe in or use to make money indirectly.

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aleccool213 profile image
Alec Brunelle

The day after I post this, looks like Medium is changing how they distribute payments: blog.medium.com/improving-how-we-c...

Will be interesting to see if the traction sticks.

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niyasrahman
  • buyme a coffee
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Alec Brunelle

Great addition. Looks like they just launched 2.0 on ProductHunt today as well: producthunt.com/posts/buy-me-a-cof...