Audio stories are now live on social journalism platform Medium, but mostly for subscribed members.

Subscriber audio offer

A couple of months ago, Medium launched a US$5 monthly subscription service with a nebulous value proposition of exclusive stories and downloadable content. Now, Medium’s membership page offers folks something more, with the ability to ‘Listen to top Medium stories’.

Medium promises professionally recorded narrations of all member-exclusive content and editor selections.Indeed, the site’s ‘Audio’ tab already features written stories that have an audio stream option available exclusively to subscribers. 

Beyond blog

Medium’s self-proclaimed mission is to provide ‘a place for important ideas that deserve to be heard.’ Audio stories deliver on that ‘to be heard’ bit quite literally.

With a smattering of pages and publications—and both professional and amateur writers generating content on the site—Medium has struggled to practically differentiate itself from other blog sites.

Medium members

Finally, with Audio Stories, Medium’s staking a claim for something a bit unique and possibly worthwhile.

At first, it seems like an interesting take on the paywall: making written content available, but the audio is only for the premium customers. A real incentive for the podcast generation to get in with Medium.

As other sites compete for video supremacy, Medium’s contrarian strategy might win it a few nods and could give it the leg-up it needs to bound towards something more.

Would you pay a premium for audio of your favourite regular reads? Is there another way Medium should have made their subscription service better?

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