We left Medium. Here’s why.
A little over a year ago, we decided to try publishing Latterly exclusively on Medium.com, a popular blogging platform. At the time, Medium was recruiting publishers to give up their own websites and migrate to theirs. It was a persuasive proposition: Medium draws 30 million visitors a month, and the site is networked, meaning traffic to other publications could spill onto ours. Plus, we could earn money on Medium by selling subscriptions to readers.
Looking back, I think we gave it a good try. The number of clicks on our site did go up, and we exposed tens of thousands of new readers to Latterly. But financially it failed. We never gained as many subscribers as we’d had on our old website. Then, in January, Medium let go of 50 employees and stopped developing new product features for sites like ours. Most recently, they even went into direct competition with other publishers on their site by launching Medium Memberships, in which readers pay $60 a year for access to select stories.
So our head of operations, Stefano Garavelli, began building a new home for Latterly in March. It’s a website that better reflects the quality and tone of our subject matter and the aesthetic of our print edition. And now we’re ready to show it to you. The web address is the same: latterly.org.
Here’s what you’ll find there:
- Newsletters are free for everyone to read, but our reported stories and essays are behind a paywall. We think readers understand our journalism is valuable, and a growing number of you are choosing to support it.
- We’ve simplified our pricing, and we’re giving you more for your money. Subscribers can pay $5 a month or $50 a year. And everybody gets 14 days free when they first sign up. All subscribers get access to stories on our website, plus a copy of the quarterly magazine shipped to their door. In the coming weeks, we’ll release a new web app and revive the iOS app; subscribers get full access to these products as well.
- We’ll publish each new issue online after it goes to press. But we’ll publish timely stories on a rolling basis.
Note to members of Latterly on Medium: You’re welcome to continue supporting us there. We’ll still get your money, and you’ll still have access to our members-only Facebook group. But you won’t have access to the new site or the print magazine. For that, you’ll have to unsubscribe on Medium by sending an email to yourfriends@medium.com and start a new subscription at latterly.org.
Anyway, sorry for the boring stuff. Please let me know if you have feedback about the site. Next week we’re back to your regularly scheduled lecture. Maybe Mike Pence will be president.
Ben
PS. If you want some next-level satire, check out PatriotHole, formerly known as Clickhole. Brilliant stuff. A friend and I had the same idea last year, but we never made it happen.
PPS. See Get Out. I dare say it’s the perfect horror flick.
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