I subscribe to Medium. It’s not expensive: $5.00 per month. I also pay about that much to many newsletters (mostly because Substack makes it so easy). And that’s 0n top of what I also pay The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Reason, The Sun, Wired, and others that aren’t yet showing up on the giant spreadsheet I’m looking at, with expense-cutting in mind.

I started blogging in Medium because Ev Williams created it, with lots of noble intentions, and I wanted to support Ev and his work. I also liked its WYSIWYG-y approach to composing pages. And I liked the stats, though I mostly stopped looking at them after they defaulted to highlighting how many claps a piece gets. I never liked the claps thing.

I forget when and why I started paying. I half remember that it was around when they pitched me on maybe making money blogging after the subscription system started up. I wasn’t interested in that, but I was interested in Medium experimenting with money-making.

But the whole system seemed kinda complicated, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. I just kept posting now and then, and it seemed to work well enough, I suppose because I didn’t see the paywall. Or worse, I did see the paywall when something I wrote got popular and became “Members Only” somehow.

I see the paywall now on this post by Doug Rushkoff and this one by Cory Doctorow. Yes, I can read their whole posts in this browser, which has a cookie that remembers that I’m a paying member; but it doesn’t on any of the other browsers I use for different purposes, and I don’t feel like logging in on all of them.

Call me old-fashioned, but I hate being teased into subscriptions. That’s why I’ve been dropping subscriptions to newsletters that tease readers into a paywall. I feel over-subscribed as it is, and the paywall tease is just rude. Ask, don’t coerce.

Here’s a lesson, newsletter writers: Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From an American is the top-earning newsletter out there, and she doesn’t have a paywall. She makes all that money (an estimated $5 mllion/year) in voluntary payments.

The question for me now is,  Do I want to move my 105 Medium posts somewhere else, or just have faith that they’ll stay up where they are, in mostly readable form?

The one thing I’m sure about now is that I’m done posting there. Ev is gone. My own reading and writing energies are too spread out. One less place to write is a good thing.

I have three blogs right here using WordPress, and I want to focus on those, and on allied efforts that seem to be moving in the same directions.

Some of my old Medium posts may be worth saving somewhere else, such as here. But maybe what I haven’t yet written is more important than what I’ve written already.

I’ll be talking shortly to some readers of The Intention Economy who are looking for ways to connect that economy with advertising. (Or so I gather. I’ll know more soon.) What follows is the gist of what I wrote to them in prep for the call.

First,  take a look at People vs. Adtech, and/or Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff.

Both are still valid (IMHO), but don’t yet cover what A.I. will inevitably do to advertising. There are two possible ways that can go.

One is toward hyper-personalized advertising based on even more pernicious uninvited tracking than we already have, with A.I.s rather than lawyers and hired intermediaries finding loopholes in privacy law that will automate specious forms of “consent” far more efficiently than possible without it.

The other is toward finding the best vectors for targeting the right audiences rather than the most-tracked individuals—and to find those amidst the millions of podcasts, newsletters, blogs, mainstream media, and other online outlets into the ever-widening world of thought, opinion, news, scholarship, journalism, sports, and the rest of it.

The former will make tracking and personalized targeting far worse, and the latter will make advertising targeted at audiences far better. It will also do a much better job of supporting journalism in the process because more money can get through to publishers and reporters who won’t be fed by an evil hand they avoid biting.

Those two directions are the chaff-vs-wheat choices for A.I.’s future in advertising. For now, there is surely far more action happening with the former than with the latter, given the sizes of today’s spinning adtech flywheels. But this also means there will be bigger opportunities with the latter: a blue ocean away from the red one.

What makes the intention economy ocean blue is that it will exist almost entirely outside both those advertising systems—and inside horizons that are far more expansive than can be seen through the lens of advertising and marketing as we’ve known them.

Here the opportunities will be in creating better signaling from demand to supply, and better intermediation between them: forms that will safeguard the privacy needs of individuals and the legitimate needs of businesses. In some cases there will be no intermediation at all—just forms of agency on both sides that are friendly to each other and can interact directly. And, where intermediations are required, they will find a wide-open space for what we’ve long called fourth parties.

To visualize the opportunities here, think of every customer as a boat afloat on a sea of goods and services, and friendly to the ecosystems where demand encourages supply at least as well as supply satisfies demand.

If you’re looking for market opportunities in this vast new ocean, here are thirteen of them.