Is The Friend of Medium, Financially and Socially Darwinian?
Just asking
Medium, in its 11 years of existence has reinvented itself more times than the Queen of pop —Madonna.
Its countless reinventions has seen it go from a place where people were drawn to writing brilliant and original pieces to a space where money was the only motivating factor.
In that period, we met lots of phenomenal scribes who turned our lives upside down and we also met those who had nothing original to offer to the millions of readers.
And no sooner had the money dried up than these fair weather folks disappeared, taking with them, the very long email lists, which Ev Williams and the Medium Staff had ingeniously put together for them.
And no, I am not having a dig at the apocalyptic specialists.
But it is in the spirit of reinvention that the announcement was made a few days ago that there will be a new category of Medium readers known as the friend of Medium.
The main advantage of the friend of Medium is that those whom you read will earn four times as much as they would do, if you’re on the regular package.
Having read and reread the article from Alex Benzer, I am very tempted to jump ship and upgrade my membership package.