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Comment by fortydegrees | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic but can anyone explain to me why a massive company like coinbase uses Medium as a blogging platform/software? Why are they not hosting the blog within their own ecosystem/site?

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From a technical point of view yes, your own hosted static site is way more efficient, you have more control over the stack, scaling, better metrics, security etc, etc.

From a business point of view it's more like...who the f*ck cares what you use? Did they read it? Yes? Good, move on.

> From a business point of view it's more like...

Usually companies use blogs as marketing tools to drive traffic to their websites. I might be wrong, but in the case of Coinbase I have never really seen anything they wrote that was precisely intended at selling a product. It's usually more informative, and shows they are trying to be more of a positive force in the industry compared to a dominant one. Kudos on them if it is the intent, and I guess it would explain the choice of platform instead of investing time and assets in developing their own.

Sure. Because if you're a startup hiring SWEs, which are a scarce resource, why would you want them implementing something that exists and isn't part of your core business?

Also, the customer is the PR/marketing department, not the engineering department. The marketing people already know how to use these platforms well, so just let them use those.

Its distracting to have extra things that engineers have to look at every once in a while. Its cheaper when accounting for employee time to just outsource random non business critical things.

Look at the dns entries for lots of big company's blogs. Many of them are just CNAMEs for wpengine or some other third party host.

I could imagine coinbase have critical cookies containing user sessions attached to coinbase.com.

If they have a wordpress blog at blog.coinbase.com, then any xss attack in wordpress can steal customer accounts.

Sure, it's a fixable problem (by moving high security cookies into login.coinbase.com or something similar), but that's a big migration, and probably nowhere near the top of the engineering priority list.

So instead they point the domain at Medium and any XSS attack on Medium can steal their customer accounts.

I highly doubt either WordPress or Medium are susceptible to an XSS attack, but if I had to bet on one being safer I would bet on the open source software already used to power thousands of high profile websites.

The vast majority of the population is not at all like HN readers and doesn't even know what Coinbase is. Blogging on Medium gives them much better exposure and reach to non-crypto people who might become interested in them because it popped up on their Medium feed vs. on the Coinbase blog.

>doesn't even know what Coinbase is.

I kinda wonder about that. I've been INUNDATED by Coinbase advertisements on mobile apps and etc talking about incentives for learning what they do and etc.

They seem to really be pushing to get the general public on board.

Perhaps true, but conversely you could also argue that the sheer number of scams and frauds in the Cryptocurrency space that had medium blogs might also put people off!

The vast majority of the population has a Medium feed?

Because a16z led funding rounds for both Coinbase and Medium.

Because blogging platforms are not their core competency, so it's worth outsourcing however big you are, and medium offers a better service than any alternative?

why would you spend engineering time on your blog when you can get something off the shelf / outsource it?

the opportunity cost is too high.

Same reason companies use Twitter and Facebook.

Possible reasons:

1. Allocation of engineering effort

2. Familiarity with readers

3. Discoverability

The usual alternative is Wordpress.

Which, honestly, is frequently deployed so poorly that it becomes an attack vector.

Trendiness.

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