Why You Need to Join Medium Today
It’s the Best $5 You’ll Ever Spend
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Full disclosure: I am a writer for Medium. The way it works is, if you are a paid member and read this article, I get a percentage of that $5. Like a nickel. So, read it twice, I’m trying to find something that costs a dime.
But I was a paying member of Medium long before I started writing there. As a matter of fact, writing for Medium never occurred to me until I stumbled across an article by Tom Kuegler. But as a reader, it was an excellent investment. It became my go-to place for information, my default search engine for quality articles.
And the excellent writing wasn’t even the best part.
I’ve been on the Internet since it’s birth. I started with dial-up bulletin board services (BBS). Then they got connected to these global networks that later blossomed into the early text-only Internet. We had FTP, and Telnet, and IRC, and it was a fantastic resource.
Then this marvelous thing came along called the World Wide Web. Well, it would have been marvelous if I wasn’t hooked up using a 300 baud modem. But pretty soon, cable came along, and I was screaming through the web. The information overload was terrific. At sites like WebMD, Weather.com, and CNet, the scope and accuracy of information were astounding. And new sites sprung up daily, because, get this, registering a domain was free.
But none of that lasted long. People quickly figured out how much money could be made in this new goldmine. And one day, an ad appeared on one of the sites. It wasn’t intrusive, and you didn’t have to click on it, but it was still annoying.
At least, I thought it was annoying. Then someone figured out, not how to make money selling things on the Internet, but how to make money selling ways to sell things. PPC. Pay per click. Click on that ad, hover over that banner, and ka-ching! Somebody, somewhere, made a fraction of a penny. Multiplied by hundreds, thousands, millions.
And that’s when the wheels came off.
Because the next phase in this devolution was figuring out how, not to provide more or better information, but to get more clicks on those PPC ads. That became the driving force behind most websites. And how do you do that…
