Since I wrote a post about 5 Medium alternatives and their upsides and downsides in which I mentioned Simily, I’ve seen and read a number of follow-up posts about this new site, for example by Kristina God, Linda Kowalchek, Christina M. Ward, or Edina Abena Jackson who will be doing a 30-day Simily challenge by the way.

I’ve given the site a try and now I’ll share 5 things I like about Simily and 5 things I don’t like.

The intro

Simily is a true Medium competitor in the sense that it operates similarly to the Medium partner program. You get in, you publish stories, and you’ll get paid for views. Unlike Medium, this earning system is truly based on unique views from anyone rather than only on member reading time.

For 1000 unique views, you’ll get $20.

Sounds not too bad, right? A comparison to Vocal where you get $3.80 per 1000 views, shows the value of Simily. Compared to Medium where I get around $34 per 1000 views, Simily isn’t too far off either.

The good

1. Pay rates at Simily are solid at $20 per 1000 unique views. Unique means based on IP or any other identifier, I assume. Which in turn means, you won’t get paid for multiple views on the same story by the same person (or IP/identifier). A key difference to Medium or Vocal.
2. Simily is fairly new. It might be the next big platform and you one of its big names. Medium was once a small new site too. Now it’s a huge success story in the blogging and writing world. Simily might be the next big thing. You can become be the Tim Denning of Simily.
3. You can earn without being a paying member on Simily. That’s a huge plus for people who want to try the platform. You don’t need to pay to earn money.
4. Simily offers groups to connect with writers and readers in certain niches. Groups can be private or open to anyone. More like Facebook Groups than Medium publications.
5. For a limited time, Simily offers its premium packs for a special launch price of $1,99 during the first month and $6,99 afterward. But you can stay on the free account which limits your reading to 5 stories per month.

The bad

Now to the bad things, and yes, there are a few bad things about this new platform.

1. Again, Simily is a new platform which means you won’t get rich anytime soon. You’ll not even earn a considerable amount of money for the foreseeable future. The reason is the payment model. Simily pays on the basis of unique views. That’s bad thing number 2
2. There aren’t many members or a built-in community just yet. As far as I can tell from the numbers on the site, Simily has “only” around 1760 members in total. Most of these are free members, I would assume. This is important because getting hundreds or thousands of (unique) views will be very rare.
3. The third key factor is the audience. Simily has started as a platform only for fiction. They now do accept non-fiction as well, but fiction is still very prominent. This will change soon though. Non-fiction is already on the rise.
4. The sudden rise of Simily and posts about it on Medium means one sure thing: Simily will soon be (and already is) filled with a lot of Medium content. The same ol’ stories about making money online or self-improvement that we’re used to seeing on Medium. This might get annoying and in the worst-case scenario decrease the quality and value for paying members. And after all, Simily will be dependant on paying members unless they add ads in the future.
5. For the last issue, read this line by Simily on their “How it works” page “While we work to build our base of readers in these first few months, Simily will pay authors $0.02 for every unique view their stories receive per month — counting views from both paying and unpaid subscribers.”
   To me, this sounds like Simily is not planning on continuing the payment model on the basis of both paying and free member views. Instead, they might change that to a Medium-like model, meaning you only earn for views from paying members in the future.

The bottom line

I like the idea of a new Medium competitor, operating in a similar fashion and compensating their writers in a solid way. That being said, I believe their current payment model doesn’t seem to be sustainable for long.

Then again, if the site takes off, it might have a bright future as a Medium alternative.

What do you think?