The Medium subscription & claps combo is just a dodge … they’ve hit the reality that consumers need to pay for good, independent content, but they’re desperately trying to avoid the dreaded “directly paying for content” scenario.
Unfortunately, that is the only scenario that does what writers and publishers actually need. Otherwise, they’re stuck in a quasi-serfdom where their financial success depends not on the value that their content has to their audience, but rather on the largesse and whim of a middleman…. That’s not an acceptable outcome for anyone but true amateurs with day jobs (and even they don’t like it).
Fortunately, the “consumers won’t pay” and “micropayments don’t work” arguments are based on pretty weak evidence. In fact, most of the evidence suggests that consumers absolutely will pay for content (as they do for everything else). Everyone has accepted the outcome of a few early, and obviously flawed, experiments as an iron-clad truth — but that doesn’t make it true.
Eventually, the paid direct to consumer approach will be given another shot under favorable conditions. The only question is whether that’ll happen before content owners literally don’t have any choice about giving it a shot if they want to stay in the content business.
