Is Medium's New Friend of Medium Membership Worth It?
Three times the cost? For what?
On November 28th, Alex Benzer of Medium announced that Medium is launching a brand new membership tier: Friend of Medium. This new membership costs $15/month or $150/year.
In contrast, the regular membership costs $5/month or $60/year.
But at three times the cost, does it offer three times the value? And should you upgrade if you’re already a member?
The point of Medium memberships.
Before we dive too much into this new membership tier, we need to understand why Medium has paid memberships in the first place.
Many sites place ads or sell affiliate products in order to keep the lights on. Instead of placing ads, which can be obnoxious and intrusive, Medium sells memberships.
Each member’s membership fee goes to support the site as a whole, and a portion is shared with the authors whose stories he read that month - provided those authors are enrolled in the Medium Partner Program.
This model helps keep Medium ad free while incentivizing the creation of great content.
What we get with a basic membership.
Without a membership, the number of articles a visitor can read in a month is limited. A paid membership grants access to the entire library of free and pay walled content, completely ad free.
And that’s a beautiful thing. I love it.
I love this both as a writer and a reader. As a writer, I don’t want ads I can’t control being shown in or alongside my content.
Members also have the ability to listen to articles, right from the Medium website or app. This is especially useful if you want to read an article or two but are either a slow reader (like me, ironically) or are busy with other things and want to listen to an interesting piece of content without having to read it.
For $5/month or $60/year, that’s really a pretty good deal. I’m biased as a Medium writer, but I think Medium has some very interesting, thought provoking content. And being able to access it all for $60/year really isn’t bad at all.
And, as a member, a portion of your membership fee goes to support the writers of the content you read.
So being a Friend of Medium is 3x better… right?
Eh. That’s complicated.
The biggest differences between the regular $5/month membership and the $15/month plan are:
You’ll be able to share friend links to other writers’ content, and those writers will earn from those views. Previously, external views were not counted in a writer’s earnings. Now they will be through the sharing of friend links to their content by users with the Friend of Medium membership. Authors can not share their own content and be paid for external views, however.
Writers whose content you read while subscribed to the Friend of Medium membership will earn 4X what they would have if you had a regular membership. If your hope is to support your fellow authors and help them earn more, then this is a nice perk.
And….
Nope. That’s it. That’s all there is.
Alex Benzer says that there’s more to come for Friend memberships, but right now these are the only two benefits to paying three times what you would be paying otherwise.
Should you upgrade?
I’m torn on this, honestly. Sure, I’m all in favor of supporting other Medium writers. After all, content creators should support each other and build community. But as it is, this membership feels really uncompelling. I don’t feel like there’s enough of a benefit here to justify paying three times the normal cost.
If this membership level meant that we could share our own links externally and get paid for that traffic, then I would be much more excited about this. When I wrote Medium’s New Friend of Medium Membership is HUGE I initially thought that we could share our own links and be paid for external views.
But that was later clarified in a comment by a Medium employee in response to another writer’s post.
I’m glad to see Medium innovating and looking for new ways to support writers and make sure the platform stays sustainable. But I’m just not convinced that I want to pay three times as much for no real benefit.
The only reason that I can think of to recommend that anyone spend the extra money and choose or upgrade to a Friend of Medium membership is this: he wants to support Medium and other writers. And those are great and noble goals, and I applaud anyone who upgrades for those reasons. But for writers, right now, there really isn’t much of an incentive in my opinion.
Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know your thoughts.