A good article, actually, and it will be interesting to see if Medium could be successful at all with their model. I definitely agree, as I looked at the plan: What exactly are they offering? Definitely could have thought more about what they could do. Even I have ideas that I cannot not reveal, as I'm trying to develop my own clever pricing model.<p>One of the hardest things to do is getting people to pay for anything. Even $5 a month, which seems like it is a cheap price to pay, is still $5 a month that is coming out of someone's pocket. For many people, it seems like it would be no problem, but just convincing someone to pay is hard enough.<p>I've been running a website for over 4 years now, <a href="http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com</a>, that is all free content, and it is kept running by volunteers who contribute articles. A donate button sits up top and has been on the website for a long time. I think I've only ever received one or two donations, resulting in less than $20. Donations get articles priority to be published faster, but not too many people take advantage of it and would prefer to just wait the two weeks or so that it takes to get published. This is not to say that I have not made some money off the website -- I came up with a text ad system that lets people purchase space on the website on articles, or space on the front page.<p>When it comes to asking for people for money though, people want to get something for their money, and there are certainly clever ways to do it. It is just coming up with those unique ways, whether a website wants to give people a certain amount of reads a month or to get exclusive access to early features or features not available to the general public. Medium.com surely has the traffic to get a certain amount of people to pay, but there will still be many who don't see the advantages of paying.<p>I would certainly pay the $5 if Medium.com would help get articles I write more exposure, even guaranteeing X amount of views/visitors based on pricing. I mean, I won't say my articles are the greatest thing ever, but I have published some useful articles, and my exposure has only been about 100 visitors or so after I've shared to Twitter and LinkedIn, so boosting that exposure with each post would certainly convince me to want to at least try out a $5/mo service.<p>It is kind of interesting considering the owner(s) came from Twitter, who has also failed to monetize as well as they could have. Hopefully they do eventually figure it out. I don't want to see any company fail, but it doesn't mean that we can't learn from their mistakes if they do.