I don't think Medium has fully grasped that people read most content because they are bored, not because they really care about the content; thus when you put the content behind a paywall, most people will just go find other ways to amuse their bored brains on the internet.
Content on the internet is usually so shallow it's bordering near worthless; lots of people just repeating other people over and over. When it comes to explaining a concept, most sites on the internet just cover the basics and promise they'll get to the deeper stuff later (and never do.)
The nice thing about the old book model (Before ebooks), is the amount of work it took to get a book published ended up filtering out all the mediocre content which we see today on the internet because it is so easy to hit publish somewhere. Paying for a book is worth it, as the book is actually a complete thought. The stuff people are trying to charge for on the internet is just mostly low quality stream of conscious writings with no actual content behind it.
>Paying for a book is worth it, as the book is actually a complete thought.
On the other hand, there are so many books out there that could be a (long) blogpost, or series of articles, but are filled with mindless repetition, just to pad out the wordcount to have a book-sized publication.
There used to be a type of publication called a pamphlet, which was longer than a magazine article, but shorter than a book. It was what we'd call a "longread" today. Medium is trying, however ineptly, to try to bring back that market segment.
Facebook hasn't figured this out with in-video ads. I don't care that much about how Tasty makes some baked good enough to sit through a 15-second ad to see the remainder of the video.
> Facebook hasn't figured this out with in-video ads.
You haven't figured it out you means. My SO watches theses ads, so does many others peoples.
At the end of the day, they still have to provide you this service, they aren't a charity. You either get theses ads, or you don't get that content... whether you believe that content is worth it or not, doesn't change its cost.
I make a habit of stopping the video as soon as I see the "Ad will start in X seconds" notice, in the vain hope that someone is paying attention to those metrics.
The nail has been hit on the head. I have more things I'd like to read than I do free time to read them. If I run into a paywall I'll bounce to something else, or go search for the same topic somewhere else.
Content on the internet is usually so shallow it's bordering near worthless; lots of people just repeating other people over and over. When it comes to explaining a concept, most sites on the internet just cover the basics and promise they'll get to the deeper stuff later (and never do.)
The nice thing about the old book model (Before ebooks), is the amount of work it took to get a book published ended up filtering out all the mediocre content which we see today on the internet because it is so easy to hit publish somewhere. Paying for a book is worth it, as the book is actually a complete thought. The stuff people are trying to charge for on the internet is just mostly low quality stream of conscious writings with no actual content behind it.