Why you are reading Antiserious on Medium now
Antiserious becomes one of the first Indian publications to shift their domain to Medium
Antiserious becomes one of the first Indian publications to shift their domain to Medium
We have been making a lot of announcements lately. Recently, we announced that we are separating our magazine and blog sections and turning the former into a quarterly. As explained in the announcement, that decision was taken keeping in mind the quality that we want to be able to deliver.
It is in the same vein and towards the same purpose, that we have decided to shift from Wordpress to Medium. This move ends our one-and-a-half year relationship with the Wordpress content management system. It is sad. Sad because we had spent so much time in learning how to work with it. Staying up nights reading on forums, seeking help from willing friends about codes we had mistakenly, over-ambitiously messed up. We are thankful to Wordpress and to those friends. We are happy that we learned things we would never have learned given that our primary job that involves not just this
But we had become tired of spending a lot of our time doing things we were not crazy about. That also meant, we weren’t able to devote as much time as we would like to writing and editing. We considered hiring someone to look after the “technical” aspect of things. We considered buying a server to host our website, moving away from the free open-source server we were using. We considered all that, but realized that at least two of our editors were still borrowing money from their parents for survival. And all of us were absolutely clueless about how to make money out of Antiserious so that we can survive doing what we love.
Then we stumbled upon Medium’s excellent proposal.
Making Medium More Powerful for Publishers
At Medium, we’re building out a new corner of the Internet specifically designed for people and publishers who want to…medium.com
The possibilities were in front of us. For us, indie publishers, this is a boon. We know the pros:
This will save our time and energy which we can invest in editorial.
This will mean we are exposed to a dedicated reading community.
This will mean that we never spend on unnecessary plugins, themes. Not worry about having to buy ten thousand extra things that would make your site load faster than others.
But we were also wary of the what we might end up losing.
We end up looking like every other site on Medium.
We lose out on tons of features that Wordpress allows through a network of developers.
We can no longer tweak our website according to our needs.
But it all boiled down to what we really want. We want people to read what we publish. The reading experience, the quality of writing matters to us more than what our website looks like. We knew we could not have spent on custom-designing a theme, and there’s no uniqueness in a theme bought from an open market.
The utter readability of Medium is a thing the industry has been jealous about for quite sometime now. With Medium we are no more worrying about updates. With Medium we are no more worrying about our server going down, website crashing.
It was reassuring to see publications like The Awl and Electric Literature — with much larger readership than ours — deciding to give this idea a go. It was reassuring also to know that if this relationship does not work out, Medium is open to let us move away without much sobbing.
We won’t deny that we are also very interested in exploring their Revenue Generation model — though that will take some planning on our part.
Revenue on Medium
Online publishers are already benefiting from Medium’s hassle-free CMS, our network of engaged readers, and our always…medium.com
We dream of paying our writers at some point of time, although we do not know when we will be able to. But we would like to try out options. (By the way, how many of you would be willing pay to read our quarterly? You can respond to this with comments.)
Without stretching this too much, we would like you to follow us on Medium like you used to subscribe to our newsletter. Only this is easier.
Follow us on Medium for updates
If you are on our homepage, all you need to do is click on the Medium Follow button seen circled here:
If you are on one of our write-ups, you can follow us by clicking on the Follow that appears before Sign in/ Sign up.
Or at the end of the write-up, you can follow our publication by clicking on the yellow button as you see circled.
This way you will be notified whenever we write something. You also get a letter every time we send one out.
Recommend what you like reading
The ❤ sign that you see is for writings you want to recommend. If you like a particular writing, please do recommend them. The more you do that, more people get to read our pieces. And this way, we grow our readership.
Bookmark to read later
You can also bookmark our content to read later. We know that you might not always have the time to read our pieces in one go. This will be particularly true for the longform pieces that we wish to publish in our quarterlies. Medium’s bookmark button will come handy in these situation. You can notice that near the share buttons that float when you are reading on Medium.
This is what it looks like:
Hope you enjoy reading what we publish. Hope we are able to live up to your expectations.