What I fail to understand is how something like Medium turns into a bloated ~150 person company that's burning VC cash like crazy with no clear path towards becoming an actual business that makes decent revenue, let alone profit. Whether it's a bubble or not is semantics but it's these sorts of 'companies' that the market needs to flush out of the ecosystem ASAP.
They need 1.4% of readers to subscribe
They charge 1/3 what the NYTimes does. The NYTimes company has +$1bn revenues.
They can probably get 1.4% of readers to subscribe. They could also charge subscriptions for blogger tools. They could have tiered subscriptions ($5 is the lowest guardian membership, and it looks like you get little for it). They have only just started offering subscriptions so I imagine what you get for $5 will only grow.
150 people really isn't bloat. Stack overflow has 250 employees and I bet you never paid them a penny. SO have VC funding to series D and they have fewer users and readers than Medium.
It seems that Medium has a viable business model: ads and subscriptions. Same as any other media business.
Medium is a bunch of blogs.
And the viable business model you mention, ads&subscriptions is excluded by the fact medium has said they will not use ads. Hence, they have no business model.
Ads and subscriptions are mutually exclusive.
Medium is just another place for people too lazy to setup a blog to post their crap. Most of the content stinks and is just self-promoting vanity posting. People won't pay for that. They could throw some ads up there and make a few bucks but again that's how a 5 person company (which Medium should be) is viable and makes people some money... not the bloated entity they are now.
If the money went to these authors, it might be worthwhile to subscribe.
But if the money just goes to the blog platform du jour, no.
Yet, if at least 1.4% of their 60m readers disagree with you then it can be a sustainable business.
I'm not sure I understand why you care that they have 150 employees. Both Medium and Stack Overflow think at least 150 people is needed to monetize their sites, yet you only dislike one of those businesses.
Medium provides me with things I could never achieve on my own personal website. It saves me a lot of DevOps time which I can focus on programming and actual writing. It provides me with an awesome uptime - I alone can't ever beat a flock of engineers on-call. I get a social network of readers who recommend my posts. Publications provide me with an easy way to get bigger number of readers. It's design and technical merits are outcome of years of iteration, time I would have to spend to reinvent the wheel.
It's not about being lazy, it's about having the time to actually provide good content.
Or they could start charging a reasonable yearly fee for custom domains. Our tech blog is hosted on medium, we have a custom domain (https://smarketshq.com/) and I'm pretty sure we wouldn't mind a couple of hundred a year for the reasonably good user experience.
Writing with their tools is not bad (although I would like the feature to automatically readjust paragraphs when pasting short plaintext lines), and submitting to a publication is easy. Turning low-friction workflow into a business case shouldn't be that much of an outlier.
This is one of the secrets of how to make money on media IMO you need very little overhead.
Maria Popova from https://www.brainpickings.org/ is making more than a $1M a year with her model.