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Media

Medium adds value to subscriptions with article audio recordings

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

May 19, 2017 | 2 min read

Online publishing platform Medium is bolstering its paid subscriptions by making available audio recordings of the best performing stories on the site.

Medium

Medium introduces audio

It a push for relevance and to attract users to its paywall, the company is adding features in a “push for a new model where contributors are rewarded based on value rather than clicks".

The company claims that some of the top pieces of content will be “professionally recorded” by a real person, side-stepping the artificial vocal inclinations of home assistants like the Amazon Echo.

The feature ads a new dimension for other publishers to consider whether it is enough to post text in a world saturated with multimedia and voice interfaces.

At the moment however, there are around 50 articles accessible via audio, although the company is currently considering allowing authors to upload their own narration – a move that would bring it into direct competition with Amazon’s Audible.

Another update to the $5 a month subscription was offline reading for users with limited web access.

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