Inside Medium's Meltdown
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Also, let me just take a moment to once again rage against Business Insider for writing a pretty bad article. The whole thing seemed purposefully antagonistic and full of sarcastic language. Maybe it's because BI is the exact type of operation Medium is trying to kill, but I think those MAU numbers actually warrant some optimism! To be fair, Medium probably should have provided some people to counterbalance all those angry publishers...
Maybe about the price of a print magazine, though.
For some reason, I've started receiving a few magazines at my house that I never asked for: Popular Science, Wired, and Cosmopolitan. They show up for six months, then stop coming. A year later they start again.
So even print is not that cheap it seems
Also, I think I would pay for the site, definitely, as long as it still somewhat pays publishers who contribute freely to the site in some cases.
I think there's room for a spotify model in writing. As a consumer, instead of a centralised platform, I'd like it to be an integration on the various websites I get content from.
I.e. the normal internet with it's various publishing engines, but paywall automatically bypased, ads automatically disabled and producer automatically credited & paid because I'm signed in to my 'servicename' account.
It's really well done, but basically does what the iTunes store did for MP3s.
What Medium faces is a rather different beast: Trying to reach the holy grail of finding non-advertising funding for journalism (ideally, without a subscription-based model).
I've read good things on Medium, but if anything Sturgeon's Law is too generous regarding overall quality. Considering the nature of the beast, I'm not even sure it is possible to change the quality ratio without potentially breaking what Medium is.
I'd be happy chipping in sub-dollar amounts here and there for the good stuff, but I am not going to pay a flat fee for access to what amounts to a whole lot of tripe and just a few meatballs.
Out of all the articles I read, I think I clicked the refund button maybe twice, and that was only because the article was truly terrible.
I can say with certainty that I wouldn't have bothered reading any of these paywalled articles if Blendle didn't exist.
Obviously, a penny is a ridiculous under-exaggeration, but I feel it demonstrates the point well; 60,000,000 times a penny isn't bad money. And clearly a real-world business model would charge at least an order of magnitude more than that.
The real problem here is transferring that money in a cost-effective way. Would it be impossible for a central gateway to manage that task, charging providers a small fee for the service?
Even people with the most modest of incomes used to regularly pay a quarter to read the daily newspaper. I see no reason why they wouldn't again, if the process was smooth enough.
Furthermore, while I'm not 'poor', I'm quite frugal, and yet I've spent quite a bit of money already on Blendle articles.
The biggest hurdle in my case was signing up and connecting my account to a payment system. But once that barrier was crossed, paying somewhere between 10 cents and 1 euro on a article became a (concerning) easy thing to do. I suspect I'm not alone in this.
- Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades.
- I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts, but I found them interspersed with his comments on other posts, posts he recommended, random snippets of text in other posts he highlighted. Again, every other blog gets this right — go to the top-level page of the blog, and you get a list of posts in that blog.
- Commenting is bad. To sign in to Medium with a Medium account, it emails me a link to sign in. For every single comment I post. I don't want so many emails. Ideally, they should just use Disqus, so I don't have yet another account.
- In any case, after logging in, the box where I should type a comment wasn't clickable.
- When I opened a second Medium post just a few minutes later, I was again signed out, so couldn't comment.
- There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. Scrolling in a smaller screen area is irritating.
- Comments and posts are mixed up. I'm reading the comment on a post, and it says there are two responses, so I click that, and I'm suddenly taken away from the comments I'm reading. I never know on Medium whether a click will yank me away from what I was reading.
As you can see, Medium breaks a lot of things that were working with every other blog for many years. Please, if you want to innovate, make sure you don't already break what is the norm. That would be like making an "innovative" car that doesn't have seatbelts.
If this is considered "idealistic", I don't mind them failing.
That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly) survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen) persistent header...
I think you should go one by one. They have their own SPA logic, so when you click new article, only the content will be loaded, other parts will stay same.
Blogger does this exceptionally well, or at least used to in its earlier default templates.
It allows monthly archives to be browsed like a tree, this does not require the page to reload and there is no waiting involved. In WordPress blogs if I click on an archive month, it will load a new page with excerpts of the posts. Without giving me a list of post titles I cannot easily decide what to read. As opposed to Medium, in many WordPress blogs, I can at least use URLs (e.g.: /2012/) to see all the posts from particular year or month, but they are paginated excerpts needing multiple clicks if there are more than a couple of posts.
Blogger had this for a long time and I don't see other templates (static sites[1], WordPress) incorporating this useful feature; this is the only feature that I, as a reader, miss in other blog platforms. Medium is the worst for this type of scan-ability. It focus overtly on prettiness[2] and leaves many usability aspects unaddressed. Presentation ugliness I can deal with Readability, Clearly[3] and similar extensions; usable archive browsing needs to be done well at the server side.
Example: I am on this page (https://darcyhsu.blogspot.com/2015/09/outlining-with-excel.h...) and I can see all his posts without leaving the current page which I arrived from Google. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/9OjiVA5
[1]: Some have list pages which is great. It only requires one extra click
[2]: Not to mention the humongous page sizes
[3]: Evernote killed Clearly
I save almost all Medium posts to Instapaper and read them there, for the same reason, and because it makes it much easier to read.
- Performance is fine. It's not great, but it's ok.
- Sometimes when I open an article/blog post and can start scrolling already it will push be back to the top. The virtual version of getting tripped up in real life.
- The bottom bar is uncomfortable. It adds zero value and adds bloat. On my iPhone 5S the SMS icon touches the Open in app button. Don't get me started on the desktop version with two bars. By the way, the useless and annoying black box that (probably lets you highlight text appears above the top bar when both are visible. I can only guess what the buttons in the black box do, they don't have tooltips.
- Try zooming in and out. Things start spazzing around with bad performance, text momentarily becomes white/invisible. The bottom bar is zoomed in too, becoming unusable moving around slowly depending on where I have scrolled. I am convinced nobody ever even tried out zooming in and out. A cheer for attention for details!
- If you start scrolling down, the top bar containing topic appears, but without its white background. The white background only appears once you stop your scrolling.
- Sometimes I "catch" the blurry, lazy loading images. I don't want to see that many seconds after I opened an article.
- Confusing navigation: Many articles lead you to other Medium sites with different top menu choices.
- The app shoehorning makes me feel like there is a lack of confidence in the web application.
Ev Williams' mission to change the way journalism is funded and operated though, that's a truly noble ideal. Yes, it's likely too ambitious to succeed. Yes, it's a moonshot. But it's exactly the kind of moonshot that Silicon Valley needs to be taking. It's exactly the kind of moonshot that the world could really benefit from. I applaud him for his decision to put his unicorn at risk, in order to build something that could truly change the world.
My takeaway: It's freaking hard to be CEO.
But finding a way to make money on blogs/internet journalism is starting to look pretty difficult. How much money is tumblr making for Yahoo? What about all the traditional media companies that should have this in the bag?
People are too used to "free" that making money on the kind of content Medium wants to be known for is starting to look a lot like a moonshot to me. But instead of the laws of physics or technology, you're going against human nature and culture. Not exactly a fight I'd want to pick.
I'm not going to argue with you about hero worship, though; it's pretty ridiculous.
Medium seems to fall into a growing group of companies that are more interested in innovating on their management/internal politics than actually creating innovative products. (Buffer, which also had layoffs and management departures, is another example.) They're very invested in trying new management frameworks like holacracy and signaling a commitment to things like transparency or diversity. This is all well and good (plenty of very successful companies have innovated on internal structures as well).
The problem is when it becomes the entire emphasis of the company. If you look at what people's priorities are, it seems like they're more interested in the company than the product. You can't have two P0s and until you have a successful and profitable product, that needs to be your P0. [0]
[0] Unless you can fund things indefinitely off your personal brand and net worth.
The moment the internet gutted ad revenue, this stopped being viable.
As you say, journalism made the news prestigious, but the news didn't actually make money either; it was just there to get eyeballs onto the ads.
Yes, absolutely. But the point is that while maybe people wouldn't have bought a newspaper that didn't have news, they still weren't willing to pay for the news component. When offered a choice between not having news and paying the actual cost if providing it, people have always opted against paying for it.
An obvious analogy is search engines. It's a useful and valuable service, but so far, users have not been willing to pay for the cost of providing one. Every search engine exists either as a loss making venture or is used as traffic/data generation for something profitable which cross-subsidises it. (Even DDG is profitable only due to their ads.)
The former is traditional philanthropy, but the latter is an interactive way to support content creation. I'm not saying that those models will necessarily translate to Medium, but that certainly seems to be the idea.
I urge anyone that's curious to go give Twitch a quick look. Spend a good half hour in a few different channels. It's really interesting. Some of the streams are what you would expect: skilled gamers playing at a high level. But many of them are very creative in how the develop a community, how they interact with viewers and chat, and what sort of entertainment experience they provide. I think that most people will 'get it' if they watch for a bit. It's compelling entertainment, and lots of people are willing to throw a lot of money at it.
The point is that it's just an entirely different phenomenon from philanthropy. NPR and Wikipedia really have no place in this discussion because they are so different.
The media that won't change their business model during the next couple of years will probably be extremely diminished in quality, and thus influence. Can't wait.
(And no, the latest fad of "native advertising", with ads disguising as articles, is not the answer. Hopefully this will fall to the wayside as more people learn critical thinking and sourcing [I don't see much evidence for this yet but I'm very hopeful ;) ])
But, the risk of losing the cadre of serious journalists at the large outlets that today are struggling, and who rightfully demand a good salary for their critical work (as members of the fourth estate), is a real one which needs to be solved. If Medium can be a part of forging a new way ahead, then more power to Ev. Haters always gonna hate, often without much thought, self-reflection, or humility.
The dead elephant in the room is the fact that the online ad experience is the most irritating and least useful ad experience in all of history.
I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing.
The ads are completely useless to me, because I'm no longer interested in buying A Certain Thing. The ads are useless for the advertiser, because they're paying for nothing. And the ads themselves are usually animated and irritating anyway.
Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.
The online ad industry has never understood the difference between adding value to readers and repeatedly smacking them around the head in a misguided attempt to force them to click the BUY NOW button.
Medium missed the point of all this. The content varies from outstanding to not so good, the design is great. But it's a bit late to be thinking about monetisation, because now it's just replaying the mistakes made by every other media platform over the last decade and a half.
Yeah Google ads are awful now. The best bang for your bank, ads wise? Facebook and Super Bowl commercials.
> Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.
When was the last time you purchased a product with print ads? I used to subscribe to a ton of magazines a little over a decade ago but cancelled them all because for every 1-2 articles of content there were 3-4 ads. It got to the point where I could finish a magazine, cover to cover, in minutes because of how many ads were in there.
Netflix recommendation engine isn't amazing either -- except that, in the case of Netflix, I often like to watch a show a second time.
Medium is failing because they are overspending and do not have really a product. Medium should have light adds and option for add-free subscription. It should share some profit with best writers to create more high quality content. Medium should have also agreements with mainstream media to republish some articles. And finally they should have enough machine learning and with twitter that they should own PR.
My experience of Medium is that the content that gets surfaced is from people who are already 'notable' in some other way (think that Medium allowing you to import your Twitter followers and have then auto follow you on Medium doesn't help this), and low value Steve Jobs self-help bullshit.
I can buy into curating 'hidden gems' using data in the way Spotify does, I can get behind breaking unheard voices, but I can't see how the current model of giving famous people a megaphone was ever going to upend journalism.
Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a company that claims to displace Wordpress it's not unthinkable for it to raise hundreds of millions.
Wordpress is software that displays a web site's content.
But what I find a bit silly is that Medium often gets held up as a journalistic enterprise when it's just a publishing platform, albeit a nice one.
If your business is going to fail after less than a decade of hubris and greed, then why not use any other blog platform?
well they were half right
This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still a vanity project.
2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing $.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B).
Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable.
2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and financials available: https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm
edit: thanks @mastazi
I think (and hope) that you missed a dot there :-)
What you are suggesting about making Twitter profitable (which I happen to agree with) seems to be what they are attempting to do at Medium with these layoffs.
An aside on the Twitter front though; at this point I'm not sure cost slashing is going to help their stock prices at this point even if they turn a profit as they are already showing declining revenues.
Twitter has a celebrity SV CEO. That's his job; what are they waiting for?
NB: I receive no additional value clawed back from DIY since I do not desire any additional experience with building, configuring, securing, managing, monitoring and maintaining web servers and/or content management systems.
They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles.
For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some powerful figures like that - retired, out of political offce. Meanwhile they should be also finding the young important voices of the future, who can be had cheap at this point.
Everyone tries to think like a VC. Medium will never be the biggest money. What they can do is be the next '60 Minutes', not the biggest, but prestigous and elevating.
You seem to be equating prominent writers with more revenue. But the real question is how do you get enough revenue even with prominent writers. It just' doesn't scale.
Colin Powell on retainer will make Medium money how?
Building a good way to monetize good writing is a very hard problem.
I'm not an insider by any means, but right from the early days of Twitter, I'd heard this word - dysfunctional - to describe Twitter a lot too. All those "fail whales" and strange and sometimes sheer dickish moves (like pulling API access to developers) were just inexplicable.
You might be on to something here.
>(I don't mean pornographic content)
Oh, never mind.
But, honestly what Youtube are you using? Despite the glut of kid-oriented content on the site, I see almost none of it. The hobby scene alone is a huge segment of the site and caters more to the 30-60 bracket than any other.
Try being a geologist or gemologist and using Youtube. 95% of searches turn up this crap show called Stephen Universe.
"And the move infuriated some of Medium's publishers, who were not warned and had bet their livelihoods on Medium and the business model Williams was ditching."
This reminds me very much of when Dave Winer very suddenly shut down weblogs.com. I remember everyone was furious with him then. The rage was personal back then, as the group of people who were weblogging was smaller, and the folks on weblogs.com tended to be the tech elite, many of whom knew Winer personally.
I really really wanted medium to be successful. Over the past several years I have tried several different places to write/host my blog and medium by far was my favorite. I loved the design, editor and most of all draft/sharing for in-progress posts. I hope they can find a better business model that still keeps same spirit.
LOL, as if CEOs (with the exception of some outliers in small businesses) ever care for their employees at the personal level. As soon as the company is in danger, it's off they go. And when the company does well, they aren't going to share the loot that much either.
There's no easy way out. I'm sure the big guys are all run by sociopaths, but the few i talked to really struggled with it. It really boils down to, some people are out of a job today, or everyone is out of a job in 6 months.
This also includes the early detection of impending doom where everybody takes a 10% paycut - executives take a lot more (for a while anyway). So you can get away without a layoff. That guy felt the business would have been better if he let 10% go. The one time event can start healing immediately. That twice a month reminder of how much less you're making keeps the wound open a lot longer.
I've never met one who didn't (effectively) say "I failed and those folks paid the price"
Both Google and Bing link to your comment as the canonical source for that quote from Barksdale.
Some googling did drag up this interview, so presumably I did not dream it: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-03-17/business/fi-47920_1_n...
A corporation would never take a new grad, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of 1:1 time to teach and mentor them, put that person's name front and center on all the products they've worked on, and celebrate when that person moves up to another company.
I doubt academia is inherently any more humane than corporations - the drive is pride and recognition instead of money but they compete just like businesses do.
I think we both agree that academia and businesses compete, but by humane I mean that the people producing the work are invested in by the faculty and universities. That the graduate student's life-long success is the university's success, and that the output is the scholar as much as the work they produced.
My point is simply that a corporation doesn't care for a person besides the work they do for them, which is a different culture from academia.
I personally think the cutoff point is somewhere between 30-50 employees.
The fact that you can become a billionaire after founding two money losing enterprises is so confusing.
It's not money losing as far as Williams is concerned -- somebody paid him mucho dinero for it.
But I think there is a big UX and design issue that should be questioned : the "feed".
This concept has been overused and it doesn't serve users. When I read on Medium, I'm in the mood for reading programming stuff, or design stuff, or other stories. But I'm rarely in the mood for reading a completely random feed of all those topics intermingled. That makes no sense to me.
And you can follow "Publications" but it doens't help very much, you still get a "feed" in the homepage. And the publications don't really work as a magazine rack.
That imho is the biggest weakness of their design.
How would I solve that? First off stop "feeding" people. I mean just the term is wrong. Why do we need to be "fed"? The assumption for this design I assume, is that a feed makes it easy to discover content and for the initial experience. But why should it remain the central piece of focus everytime you start the app?
I think it would make more sense to add the concept of magazines. That is why I think Flipboard works so well (at least for me). The problem with Flipboard is that it also treats every magazine as a feed, and is designed primarily as a RSS kind of consumption where old content is to be forgotten while only new content is relevant. Thus it also doesn't work as a repository of valuable articles. A lot of things are written that are timeless and both the Flipboard and Medium approach and insistence on "current day" writing/ stories reduces the value of these tools.
What I would suggest is to add the concept of magazines at the very least. Let people create "baskets" of interests, and let them drag and drop tags into these baskets. Then present those "smart magazines" with tags showing where there are updates?
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As an aside my experience with Medium last month could be summed up in two words: "feminist rants".
Ever since I started using Medium, I thought.. I already use Flipboard and Feedly. So let's focus. There are some pretty cool CSS/Javascript articles on here so I decided to follow exclusively programming and design topics. I would read Medium in the morning to catch up on front end dev lang.
But.. Medium had another idea. My feed kept getting ridiculous feminist rants and other political B.S. I don't want to read. No matter how many times I pick "Show fewer stories like this" I couldn't get rid of them. This happened for several weeks.
I contacted them because I thought my account was the perfect example of something wrong with their recommendation algorithm. Why on earth did Medium keep saying I am interested in feminism when I NEVER recommended any such articles (they tend to have obnoxious click bait titles and terrible writing)?
I looked through every person that I may have followed or recommended. I could'nt find anything. The closest to a meaningful connection I could see is one female journalist who "liked" on of my responsoes. Mind you Medium considers a simple comment to someone else's story as a "story". As if a comment had the same value as writing an articile in the first place. But I digress...
So I blocked a couple people. First off, they don't disappear from the notifications pane. This is WRONG imho.
Secondly, it didn't change squat.
Eventually I became sick and tired of seeing feminist rants in the middle of my programming / design feed; so I deleted my account and started anew. Hey at least Medium got this right : you can delete your account entirely and it was easy.
So here is my tips for people who still want to use Medium:
- NEVER EVER follow anybody whom you aren't sure that they share your interests 100%. - NEVER EVER recommend any articles unless you reviewed the tags and all the tags are specific enough to your interests. (Medium loves to make all kind of tangential connections and also recommend you stuff based on extremely lose tags like "Journalism" or "Essay"... follow these and soon enough raging feminists will entertain your feed every day).
Funny enough even with these rules in place. When I created my new account I still got an influx of feminist/political rants (bad writing) but they were gone after a few days.
And I realize that I use Medium in a way they probably didn't mean to: I really focus my feed on an area of interest. But then again they designed this completely wrong putting things backwards. When I go into a newspaper shop, I browse the rack for magazeines I'm interested in. I don't go to the owner and say, "hey you got something from me to read?" And even if I did, he'd probably look at me weird for a moment, then he'd be like "well, what do you like to read?"
Presumably this is what the tags system is supposed to do. Many online sites lets you pick your "interests" whne you creat a new account. But the analogy stops herE. Because in a newspaper shop, I'd tell the guy "well, videogames, and uh.. science". And he 'd point me to magazines. He wouldn't print a "feed" to me of random crap from different sources.
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PS: Also please stop writing "stories" in your iOS updates and tell your users what you changed or fixed, even if it's minor thing. Yeah, we get it you're all about "stories". Jesus. Stick to medium if you want to entertain people, and serve your users by describing what yo uactually changed or updated, even if it has to be the usual "misc performance fixes".