Medium Cuts Staff By One-Third, Shuts Down New York and DC Offices (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Medium, the San Francisco-based online publishing platform founded in 2012, has laid off 50 employees, or roughly one-third of its staff. The company will also close offices in New York and Washington, DC. Ev Williams, Medium's CEO, wrote in a lengthy post on Wednesday that the company would be changing its business model despite ending 2016 as "our best year yet." He blamed the entire concept of "ad-driven media on the Internet" as the root of the company's shortcomings. As Williams, who is also a co-founder of Twitter, wrote: "It simply doesn't serve people. In fact, it's not designed to. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other "content" we all consume on a daily basis is paid for -- directly or indirectly -- by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result, we getwell, what we get. And it's getting worse."

Comments

Alternative financial models to eyeballs-for-ads

[shanen]

Based on my comments posted over on Medium (but largely applicable to Slashdot, too, so you can substitute in most places):

Pretty sure I looked at Medium a while ago, and if so, today’s visit reminded me why I wasn’t interested. Same sad story, same verse.

There’s a fundamental mismatch here. Many people really do want to know about the problems of the day and even want to help make the world better. Many people want to learn new things so they can make better choices and be more free.

Such goals are irrelevant to the advertisers who are paying for the “free” websites. They would actually prefer docile robots who will quietly obey the ads and buy the toothpaste or politicians. The kind of news they want to pay for is disaster porn like CNN or profitable propaganda like FAUX “news”.

Apparently Medium is not succeeding with what appears to be click-bait approach. Are they desperate enough to consider REAL alternatives? Here are a couple of the top of my head:

(1) Sell SOLUTIONS to the problems. After each article about a problem there should be some links to proposed projects to help SOLVE the problem. Interested readers could look over the projects and buy a share, perhaps $10 a pop, and if enough wannabe-helpful donors agree, then the project would get funded, and later evaluated and the results reported on. The sponsor should be a charitable umbrella organization that would make sure each project proposal was complete and a percentage of funded projects would go back to the websites that helped publicize the problem (like Medium).

(2) Auction my valuable time in LIMITED amounts in exchange for sponsored news. The intermediary (which might be Medium) would have good reason to protect my privacy and personal information in order to protect their involvement, and the companies that are selling goods and services I actually want would get more reliable access to the customers who actually WANT to buy what they’re selling.