Behind the Scenes of Medium’s Subscription Product
Fountainhead News: Mar 23, 2017
Last night a nice surprise pinged into my inbox from Ev Williams and our friends at Medium announcing their subscription product and because I’ve been using the product since the very beginning of the service, they allowed me into the first small wave of folks to join.
Of course, we’re familiar with how the process works from running our own subscription fountainhead service for Humanizing Tech.
I like the words they use. Founding. Because it makes their users feel like they own a piece of the product, even as they ask you to pay. Clicking into the post, which is locked for only certain invited users you get to read a lot of the background. But we’ll cut straight to the meat of the post:
They also reached out to me a few weeks back asking to submit story ideas since I’m one of the most active writers on the service. You might be seeing a bit of our exclusive content making its way to the subscription service.
Of course I signed up immediately and gave them my credit card. Humanizing Tech was probably the single greatest investment I’ve made in my life, as far too many great opportunities and relationships were created as a result of it.
After you sign up, you get an interesting little half circle around your picture across all your content on the service. It’s an old gamification technique that makes other users want that new, exclusive feature. Some people will subscribe just so they get that badge of honor.
This is what my profile looks like now:
And then the real payoff is you get your own personalized homepage curated with high-quality, custom-written content. Medium is quick to point out that the page is not infinite scroll, but rather has only a set list of content that will reset every day. Below is a screenshot.
I suppose the question you have to answer yourself, as already a paid member of The Fountainhead Movement, is whether you’re also going to pay for the over-arching Medium service.
For us, it makes sense because we’re supporting the product that supports us. But if you’re only looking for very specific types of content on Medium, then the test will be how well the paid writers do.
— Sean
