Comment by franzen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franzen | Hacker News Reader

If you check out all of the "sponsored" or "partnership" content on Medium, like:

https://theringer.com/

https://electricliterature.com/

https://medium.com/the-economist

https://medium.com/@generalelectric

https://medium.com/@Starbucks

You'll notice the engagement is absolutely terrible. Between 10-100 likes, and even those stats are inflated by (no doubt terrified) Medium employees. Keep in mind, the rough "like" to "view" ratio is ~1:100, so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 views. Those are okay numbers when you're paying your writer/marketing guy $200 per post. Hardly the foundation for a company valued last year at $400M.

Of course, Medium could monetize with banner ads like every other site, and it does have enough traffic to do that (it's the 371th most visited site in the world.) However, most writers only write on Medium because there aren't any ads. If Medium suddenly started monetizing on my content "YouTube style" I would leave them for Wordpress in a second. The Medium community is fine (they'll drive 100-1000 views per post on my pieces) but that's not enough to justify graffitying my content with ads.

It seems like there's a major identity crisis going on here. On one hand, a lot of great pieces are published on Medium. (Perhaps not as many since Medium de-funded/spun-out their flagship in-house publications, Matter and Backchannel). But there's also a crazy amount of crap. The top stories on Medium are almost invariably listicles and trite "How I Xed my Y in Z days".

I get the feeling Medium set out to position itself as a curated Wordpress (which might justify that gargantuan valuation) but these days it feels pretty much like an awkward, less popular, and slightly more erudite Buzzfeed.*

*Buzzfeed is not without its own problems. See traffic stats here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com

> so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 view

I think there's probably a problem in these numbers, but I'm 99% certain you've misread the tea leaves.

The Ringer page views are through the roof. But those are not coming from regular Medium users who typically leave reviews. So the problem is, why don't these visitors engage more, rather than why doesn't The Ringer have any page views.

IMO, big sites like The Ringer are bets that obscure what's wonderful and working at Medium. For a blogger like me, posting to Medium is a 10x on page views. 37Signals posted something similar. All the mid-size blogs that come over are having a great time.

To be fair, The Ringer is a pretty big outlier. "Have Bill Simmons tweet every article we post" isn't really a replicable business model.

Yeah, and it's the only site on that list that I know anything about. Just wanted to point out that you can't judge page views based on the number of recommends that a Ringer article gets.

you still would get way more viewership on linkedin posts, even though their system sucks

I've been trying to get to the heart of Quora and LinkedIn view numbers. My experience is that the absolute value is high but that the value of those people is close to nil. I know I'm not alone, but I don't know if that's a near universal experience.

My anecdotal experience is that I never get retweeets or mail from things I post there, whereas the people who read and then respond on Medium seem like the exact kind of people I want to influence. Not all viewers are created equal.

Okay, that's a fair criticism. I don't have inside info on The Ringer's page views. I have info on another dozen or so publishers though, and the ~1:100 ratio generally sticks.

Since you're a Medium advisor, maybe you can shed some light: how many of The Ringer's page views are coming because of native Medium readers vs. because Bill Simmons is linking to articles?

If I'm a deep-pocketed advertiser with little social media engagement (unlike Simmons), how does posting to Medium benefit me? Why am I not better off paying Bill Simmons to tweet about my product than pay the Medium middle man?

Relatedly, is it fair to extrapolate Medium's "10x on page views" on your blog to the average user, who doesn't start off with 20k Twitter followers? (Note: Medium uses Twitter followers to kickstart your Medium following.)

For the average user who doesn't know how to market their posts, I agree, Medium is a godsend. There's a small community of committed readers (good for page views) and the design is great (good for sharing.) But do you really think that these are game-changing advantages? Do you think that these advantages will survive once/if Medium starts plastering its posts with banner ads?

Here are my recent stats. I don't know really that the 1:100 ratio is real at all: https://www.quora.com/profile/Tony-Stubblebine

I do know though that specific to The Ringer that their page views are completely decoupled from what you can see in engagement. I have no idea where that's coming from or even what's required for them to be a media success. But I do know that they are getting heavy traffic.

Re: game changers. I wrote in one of the other threads that my analysis of the market is that there is has been a non-stop demand for personal publishing products since 2000: blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Twitter, Tumblr.

And we're in a moment now where many of those seem institutionally unable to modernize. This word "game-changer" is so loaded. Is changing the game the goal? Or just serving a huge market?

From the start, I've seen Medium as at minimum a modern version of an evergreen class of software. Obviously, they've done that by simplifying out features that end up not mattering a lot (customizable themes) and making a beautiful text editor.

On top of that, none of those other platforms ever did anything to boost my page views. I think that's a real benefit of the platform that goes well beyond whatever audience you bring with you.

I see my own stats (based on 20k Twitter followers) and the stats of people in my publication (Better Humans). It really seems like the pairing of a strong title with strong content is the primary driver of traffic. Publications will take those articles and then recommends will drive a ton of traffic.

Many of the people who write on BetterHumans are starting with no audience to speak of. It's certainly a huge ego boost to experience a few thousand page views for the first time.

BuzzFeed is an interesting reference because they've switched to an emphasis on video content (higher engagement + more ad opportunities) as a hedge against the declining publishing industry.

If Medium allows native video publishing, that would certainly be a curveball.

I used to love Grantland, it's sad to see it reduced to such a pale (and strikingly partisan) imitation as The Ringer has become.

The Bill Simmons media empire has crashed and burned.

I'm in your boat and was pretty disappointed by the initial incarnation of The Ringer.

I heard Bill say on a podcast that he had a different theory about where media had gone. It was faster, mobile and more immediate.

So the initial implementation of The Ringer seemed like short, trite pieces produced quickly. Like you'd get a dumb Game of Thrones piece within 15 minutes of an episode airing.

Thankfully, they seem to have backed off and gone back to long form, loving fan pieces with obscure links and embeds. For example, this Donald Glover piece: https://theringer.com/you-have-to-take-donald-glover-serious...

TLDR; I'm curious what you think of the more recent Ringer stuff. Because to me, it's so much better and is exactly why I loved the old Grantland.

Thanks for linking to this.

I too loved Grantland and have been disappointed with Simmons' more recent efforts, but this is good. And Atlanta is fantastic.

Thanks! Yeah, a lot of the new Ringer stuff has been great. The Simmons model of content written by true fans is a great model. The low quality version of that doesn't work. But they seem to have figured it out and new posts have been much higher quality.

I'll have to start checking it more frequently. It even appears that Bill has actually started writing again. Maybe there'll even be a mailbag again someday...

One thing that Simmons has never figured out is that just because someone shares your interest for football doesn't mean they share your interest for mafia movies.

Instead of making 1 site (or 1 show) that is a grab-bag of various things-that-Bill-Simmons-likes, why not have several niche sites that cover different topics?

I can't read The Ringer because I don't want to get movie reviews from the same place I get NBA game breakdowns.

Also, the ratio of joke articles to serious articles is all wrong. It should be 1 joke article for every 10 serious articles, at least.

I think this is interesting because I actually am fascinated by a great writer like Simmons, who is one of the last honest sportswriters. I'm curious about his other tastes because I view him as an authentic cultural critic. But I do wonder if I'm in the minority or you are with that opinion! Good comment.

I see Simmons as a fan with a platform. That's what I like about him, he's unabashedly a fan. I don't mind when he makes references to pop culture and other things he likes, but I mostly read/listen to him for his take on sports.

So when some other person writes on his website that "SoundCloud Comments Are the Only Good Comments", I just don't care about that. At all.

Do you think the problem is the site navigation? I subscribe to a couple of newspapers and it doesn't bother me at all that I get both movie reviews and financial news from something like the NY Times. I generally have found this to be true with the Ringer as well. The fact that I found a movie review to be insightful drives me to read more of the sports coverage because it carries a similar expectation of quality.

Yes, navigation is a big part of it. Currently for sports the nav lists NFL and NBA. That's all. I know the site covers more sports than that, I've read the articles. There's a college basketball podcast, an MLB podcast. But there's no "Baseball" section to the website.

Fixing the nav would help but it wouldn't be enough if 50% of articles are humorous.

Slight tangent, but this is why I stopped reading The Verge. Their editorial product went from tech to tech + sci-fi + American pop music + cars. Which I guess is great for a large subset of their readers, but alienates those of us who read contemporary fiction, listen to classical music, and ride bikes.

(By contrast, the one print newspaper I still buy, the (UK) Observer, does all of the above and more.)

Would people still have problems with advertisement if it was extremely tailored towards them? I'd presume Medium already collects data on their users and their preferences -- does Medium sell that to ad. companies, and is it effective in its current state?

Maybe Medium can still expand outwards, such as if they created a Google chrome extension or browser annotator to save all the highlights I have on other websites that I read (e.g. NYtimes, Bloomberg); and later using that data to give better ads -- I probably wouldn't mind if it wasn't intrusive.

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