Oh for sure. You're definitely right about that.
It's just short-sighted. Various metrics might go up from month to month or year over year, but they'll drive away their cuatomers over a decade.
It's just short-sighted. Various metrics might go up from month to month or year over year, but they'll drive away their cuatomers over a decade.
1 - direct response advertisers (obviously not all of them, but a big fraction) care deeply about purchases / test drives / whatever. Interactions that don't lead to purchases don't make money for a publisher. fb pretty thoroughly poisoned the well for advertisers paying for some sort of fleeting social interaction, though Snap is trying.
2 - Everyone here complaining about medium and still reading it... it's like that Woody Allen joke --
Woman one: "The food here is terrible."
Woman two: "I know, and such small portions!"
At the end of the day the content itself is mostly what matters. As long as people I want to read are posting on Medium I'll read stuff there. And really, it's not that bad these days. But, if the same content were posted somewhere else that offered a better reading experience I'd definitelt to read it there. I do generally avoid clicking on links to local newspaper and TV news sites, since they tend to be truly awful.
Publishers know that content is what matters most, and people will put up with a ton to get to it. But they have a much weaker grip on content than they probably think.
By contrast, publishers have a very weak grip on us, the end users. We prefer to consume our content on platforms like FB and Snapchat and Twitter, or linked on boards like Reddit and HN. Very few of us are actually direct-navigating to publishers' sites and apps to consume content at the source. And we have decreasing loyalty to any particular publishing brand.
Ultimately this may lead to a weaker grip on content. If anyone can make the economics of publishing work while retaining a smaller staff of better compensated journalists, they will be able to have their pick of the best journalists in the world. The compensation bar is really really low these days, and anyone who pays journalists a comfortable living wage in 2017 can clear that bar and win a ton of goodwill. It's the revenue side of the equation that's tricky to make work.