Or to sell themselves. Or worse, writing a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence".
It's been a great program for us. We write in the area of personal development and it's allowed us to pour a lot of money into getting authors who've actually tested their advice and then working with them to write very thorough tutorials that other people could follow.
In my biased opinion, what we used to compete with was trash simply because it didn't work. Content marketers were writing great headlines for productivity advice they'd never tested, the advice had huge gaps or mistakes, and then it would stop short of telling you what to do so that it could make some call-to-action sales pitch.
We've been getting much less competition for page views from these trash articles based on recent Medium changes. The biggest change was that they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm.
As an example, I have an article I wrote that's just creeping up on 1M page views. That just wasn't possible before.
- they handle distribution and are better at it than us.
- they pay more than we'd make in ad rates or conversion to our own services.
- it lets us focus on what we love doing, which is the writing and editing, without managing the other side of a publishing business.
We have license to the copyright for most things we've done in the last 18 months, so it's not a full lock-in either.
One question though - what do you mean by distribution?
They used to have zero revenue and deep investor pockets. Now they have growing revenue and still have deep investor pockets. There's ways for them to disappear, but fewer than there used to be.
Re: distribution. On a typical article, 80% of page views comes from within the Medium network through promotion by the Medium algorithm. Those page views (and even the followers of our publication) are readers that Medium sourced by publishing lots of other articles than ours. Their algorithm is much more reliable at driving 10k's or 100k's of readers than my other choices: mailing list, reddit, hackernews, SEO.
They aren't some scrappy startup anymore, they are the big dog in the space and doing those kinds of things doesn't exactly signal that all is well.
I answered this above too. Medium finds me readers, both a lot of readers and high quality readers.
They break out their stats by how many readers came directly from promotion throughout the Medium network. For a typical article, that can be in the 10k's of readers.
I didn't mention this above though, which is that Medium readers seem to be very high quality. They share posts out on social media, so they're good for helping get the word out, and a lot of them are people I end up meeting in other contexts.
I have one post from October that's creeping up on 1M readers. I never would have been able to get that many people to read it on my own.
I wasn't aware of that. Maybe I'll start clicking on Medium links again (on purpose). "Trash articles" is a good description of the most recent content I read on there before giving up on Medium.
This is amazing - this is the thing that people demand of Youtube, in order that the algorithm stops promoting anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers.
And therein you have found the crux.
Take away the massive human resource cost of moderating this they still run the risk of implying approval/endorsement of things they do not manually kill that the algo throws up.
Personally I think you could just consider that training for the AI.
They will have to so something eventually, I can’t see the EU whose member nations do have hate speech laws letting this rabbit hole continue for much longer.
I'm fortunate to have enough experience to tell the wheat from the chaff usually, but holy hell there's a lot of sifting to do. I'm currently studying Python for the first time and the amount of garbage writing on the language I find is frustrating.
However I am still a beginner in programming as well as deep learning so maybe I lack the the ability to distinguish between real and fake experts.
As someone learning programming this hurts so much. I've read so many medium articles that are sort of correct .... but also not and imply things that are straight wrong.
They clearly aren't that many steps beyond my ability and their writing implies they are ... but their work way not.
Really frustrating when you see an obvious template or pattern that is just a bit "off" used in medium post after after post and the code works, but is way not handy to use as you can't really build much off of it / alter it with ease.