How Medium’s $5 Per Month Subscription Compares to Other Subscriptions
I started my monthly Medium subscription over one year ago. I had been reading articles on Medium long before that, mainly after clicking on top hits from search engine results. After Quora had brought me immeasurable enrichment from other writers around the world, along with unexpected success as a writer myself, I saw Medium as an additional avenue for continued growth. I immediately became entranced by Medium’s thousands of digital magazines and many thousands of regularly published articles. I felt I was wandering the halls of a mega-museum or perusing the shelves of a super-library. As months went by, I regularly visited Medium to savor as many articles as I could. Now, a year later, I still find my Medium journey is just beginning.
My wonderful enchantment with Medium is hardly a rare tale. Tens of millions of readers visit the site annually, with millions of posts published each year. As millions of those readers pay the monthly $5 per month, the fee is nicely distributed back to top writers. Some even have reported making $50,000 per month! But as amazing as the revenue can be for writers, perhaps even more remarkable is the wealth of resources available to subscribers for such a small fee. Sure, Medium’s vast collection of amazing magazines and original content is hardly a sample of the boundless stream of works generated by humans. However, a small membership fee may be one of the greatest deals ever for readers who want to access some of the top content they could find. We should briefly examine some of the top publications and resources and explore their cost for access to truly see how Medium’s fees may be one of the closest deals you can get to a free lunch. (One note here is for this article I do not convert the $5 to other forms of currency, as it would be difficult to include the numerous other currencies millions of subscribers from around the world use. For this, I offer my profound apologies).
How Much Do News Subscriptions Cost Again?
Remember when the main sort of published news source was the daily newspaper? You could drop a couple of coins into a slot and pick up the latest issue, or even pay a few dollars a week for the delivery person to throw on your doorstep? Well, in our early 21st century world the newspapers are still there(even in print form to a large degree), but mainly online. How much do you have to pay for a major news subscription? Well, D.C.’s The Washington Post has a discounted monthly subscription for $4 per month, slightly under Medium’s price. And these huge newspaper publishers sure have a full slew of sections and sub-publications as well. You’ve got the news, op-eds, exclusive reports, weather, comics, travel section, and so forth. The New York Times, in all its voluminous parts, also offers the $4 per month. Wow, you could just pay $8 per month for these two major news publications and have access to some of the greatest news reporting, information, and commentary in the world.
Does Medium stand up to these sources with its extra dollar? Medium is certainly not meant to be a news platform, so it wouldn’t be the best source for your local, regional, or national news. However, thousands of articles are published weekly having to do with the latest events and experiences. Simply follow the tag News to find the latest articles and also browse among thousands of archived pieces. Many of these might be commentary or op-ed-type pieces offering insights, while others also bring you niche or hidden news. For that five dollars per month, you may not get unlimited access to the likes of the big names, but you have dozens of news-related publications and countless writers related to news that offer fresh perspectives and high-quality content.
What About Academic Resources?
Many secondary school teachers plus most college professors may not recommend Medium publications as academic resources for term papers or the latest breaking research in a field. They would insist on accessing academic, primary sources from selective books and academic journals. Usually, the thousands of academic journals out there are specialized, highly selective, and even esoteric. They generally publish articles from the top researchers, scholars, and experts in the established domain that have gone through an extensive peer-review process. Now, just because Medium does not peer-review articles nor establish publications from top-ranking domain experts does not mean it is a frivolous platform for research or academic study. For one, studying the tagged articles by any subject can give a general understanding and offer fresh insights into a topic, leading to further critique and analysis for which the specialized resources can be consulted. Second, Medium publications like Books Are Our Superpower or even The Startup, among countless others, serve as new domain journals in their own right that offer reviews for primary resources and insights and glimpses into different domains or professions. You can certainly use Medium as a starting point on your academic research journey.
How do subscriptions to academic resources compare to Medium’s low-cost fee? Well, those academic resources can be quite expensive in price. Academic institutions generally must pay millions for access to these resources, either in electronic database or print form. This is no surprise, as even a single issue of a journal or magazine can cost hundreds of dollars. A single issue of the Oxford Academic Journal Cerebral Cortex, for example, costs $481. Fortunately, you can access the pdf or digital version of most articles for no charge, provided it is for fair use and follows the publishers’ terms and conditions. Many of Cambridge’s academic journals also range in the hundreds of dollars for a single issue. These days, it is fortunate a growing portion of academic publications are available in open-access repositories that offer no charge for access. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists many of these. Open access to thousands of these most esoteric, specialized resources is certainly amazing, but the $5 per month fee is not so bad either. Especially considering how a large portion of academic publications still cost an arm and a leg, Medium’s low monthly fee still nets much lower on the scale of averages for the total cost. Plus, as we have already demonstrated, you are certainly getting your money’s worth in terms of Medium’s own genres of academic works available.
Other Specialized Publications in Various Fields and Their Varying Costs
Outside of the academic ring, you certainly have countless specialized publications from various fields in the not-as-selective column. How do these add up and compare to Medium? It seems that in terms of quality, Medium and these specialized publications are on the same level. To start, let’s look at the vast domain of philosophy and just a sample of its thousands of publications. You can subscribe to Philosophy Now for $18 per year, which gives you six bi-monthly issues. And then issues of New Philosopher run anywhere from $15 to $30 per issue (digital or print). These are just a sample of pricing for top-rated philosophy content out of countless more resources out there, but look how that compares to Medium. On Medium, you easily have digital magazines like The Aperion Blog or Science and Philosophy bringing in amazing philosophical insights from numerous writers. And to think you can access 102,000 stories under the general tag of philosophy is enough reading you would find in numerous publications. Again, the countless academic and specialized publications out there may offer advanced depth and scope. But for this area of philosophy, Medium has indeed showered out its own unique, scholarly content to enrich readers of all kinds for that very low fee.
Equally, you list 111,000 stories in science. And you can’t go too far into essays under this tag without running into publications like Cantor’s Paradise (a publication for both mathematics and science). These science writings are all included in $5 per month. Certainly, science publications like Nature might be more academic and extensive in scope, with article access going back to 1997 if you purchase the annual $199 subscription. But Medium’s scientific publications are a unique pool of knowledge to add to the boundless world of scientific content out there, and to a level much more accessible than many other publications.
When you get to literary publications, you certainly are also running into thousands and thousands of publications to both offer submissions and place subscriptions. Many of these, like Maudin House, offer their online magazine at no charge and also other published works for regular cost. And each genre or domain of writing in itself, like Quartet Journal an online literary magazine featuring writing mainly from women over 50. There may be no fee for access or submission to many of these publications. In this area, Medium again parallels with its countless literary publications that bring immeasurably rich content while also allowing new and established writers to offer new works. Publications like Writer’s Blokke offer budding writers the chance to spread their wings while The Writing Cooperative brings readers and writers together from around the world. All over Medium, you can find some of the best poetry, fiction writing, non-fiction prose, and memoirs anywhere and also grow as a writer in powerful ways.
Medium Is Among the Best
So here, I have sampled various domains and spaces of knowledge resources available and sized them up to Medium in terms of cost and content. The comparisons have shown Medium’s unique value and quality, while also not taking away from the unique positives from other platforms or domains. Even after this sampling, however, we have barely scraped from the surface. How does Medium compare to the numerous other blogging and writing sites? What about the countless platforms and apps offering exclusive information and content to paying subscribers, including ancestry.com? How would you account for those countless apps offering everything from comics to running to brain-boosting puzzles? What about when we get into other content forms like video and media streaming? No matter how far we take the analysis, we are sure to find many new positives and advantages to Medium as well as weaknesses and limits.
One thing for certain on Medium — you truly find a whole hidden super-library of articles. How awesome to consider the thousands of publications on Medium. Many have only one author and a handful of followers, while many others with both writers and subscribers numbering into the thousands. True, many of these journals are archives of older articles with no new articles, often just sitting there like decaying buildings in a ghost town. Also true is that Medium has changed up its format so much that many of the larger publications were even forced to stop printing new articles. However, numerous new publications continue to emerge and both novice and veteran writers submit an enormous stream of articles daily. Just imagine subscribing to a handful of publications like some mentioned. They can cost a few dollars per month or go for a larger amount on just one issue. With say, just a dozen or two subscriptions, you could easily be wracking up a large bill every month — perhaps even hundreds of dollars. With Medium, you literally get hundreds of times the resources and content for just $5 per month(equaling a low $60 per year).
Sure, you can find other platforms and institutions out there that certainly give Medium a run for its money. Quora, Wikipedia, Youtube, and countless other domains are equal parallels with their own unique positives and advantages. And mega-entities like Google in all its apps plus brick and mortar institutions like the United States Library of Congress or the U.K.’s British Library dwarf Medium and similar platforms. But with its thousands of publications and millions of posts, Medium is immeasurably valuable with its unique perspectives and high-quality content. There is nothing quite like Medium, and its $5 per month cover charge for regular membership is truly one of the greatest deals anyone could ever find. Besides serving as a revenue source for numerous amazing writers in the Medium Partner Program, the small subscription fee is also charged for the same reason visitors to a museum might face a charge — that’s the small cost required for the preservation of gold.
