Ev Williams to step down from Medium
ev.medium.com
ev.medium.com
I don't think that you can't build a subscription business at Medium. What I told the team internally is that we had a Goldilocks problem where one thing we tried was wrong in one direction and what we're doing now is problematic in a different direction.
But I've been publishing on Medium since the beginning and have a pretty good sense of the intersection of quality and Medium's model. What I'm saying is keep an open mind. We grew a pretty large subscription already with a lot still that we can do to make it much higher quality.
'Cuz, here, look at it:
There's so much junk in the way of the content. It feels like Medium doesn't respect the text or the act of reading. Night and day compared to Substack.
If I'm in any way typical, you've got a lot of work to do to overcome the negative associations of the brand.
I'll have to dig up my analysis I did last year (using BigQuery HN data), but on HN there are more Medium links than ever, but they tend not to get voted on at the same rate as older stories which tells me at least for the HN crowd it isn't worth clicking on them.
1) It is too much work: In world of static site publishing and easy cloud hosting it is not too much work for technically competent person to host their own content if they have something worthwhile to say.
2) Not our core competency: Many companies or teams who say this sounds to me management style BS. If hosting few articles in your domain is beyond their competency then I can't really trust whatever cloud, big data, distributed, serverless computing they are talking about.
Ultimately I think lowering the barrier for publishing is a good thing, but that comes with an inherent cost on quality and the incentives just aren't there for businesses / brands to solve this. The backstop for me is personal reputation. Individuals can maintain integrity and principles, businesses cannot (except as a function of stable individual leadership). Therefore, I believe platforms which orient towards scalability and anonymous algorithms will be a race to the bottom (eg. Medium, TikTok), and platforms which orient around the individual (eg. Substack) will at least have a chance at representing quality (monetization, scalability, VC-pressure concerns notwithstanding).
Medium significantly improves your reach and access to statistics to understand readers better. Until Medium came around I had clue I could ever make a living as writer.
A lot of us use Medium because it has solved a problem long plaguing the internet: How do you get paid for creating content?
I know myself that so don’t want to sign up to one dozen places for subscription. That would be the problem hosting your own site. Few people want to have 10 different subscriptions. With medium one subscription gives access to a lot of writers.
You can host a WordPress site on blog.yourcompany.com for an amount that rounds to $0, and it will probably satisfy most people who dislike Medium and other aggregators.
Or you can roll your own of course, but the extra geek cred you will get for it is minimal. Not saying don’t do it, I’ve done it more than once, but do it for the doing.
This annoys me about all sites, but I think it feels worse on Medium because I remember a time when I thought Medium was decent. The design itself still looks good, and that, too might be why the bank feels worse.
I am hopeful that /u/tonystubblebine will reply to your comment, and I'm genuinely hopeful and interested in his answer because it essentially determines whether I'll open myself back up to reading and publishing on Medium.
There's a lot of junk in the content too. In the software topic, I have read some articles that had interesting code by what sounded like entry-level to mid-level software engineers, and it was helpful for me when I was grasping with similar problems. But most of the senior-level author articles that are more about concepts, high-level project or organization problems and similar, most of the interesting stuff was outside of it. On medium I rarely see articles like that, what I see most are articles that try to be about that, but read like written by a non-senior author, and is sometimes buzzwordy or has no information I can extract beyond self promotion of the author.
Yep. Damaged goods. Sorry Tony. If a medium article comes up as a link or a part of my search, that's a thing I won't be clicking.
I do not want to monetize my writings anymore, but there was one day, when I did.
But your behavior made that impossible. You said once Stripe start working in India, you'd start MPP in India, then they started in Beta. Then you said when Stripe comes out of Beta, you will have MPP in India.
Then when Stripe started full-fledged service in India, you stopped mentioning India.
This behavior really frustrated me and made me stopped considering Medium seriously for anything.
I made good money on Quora in the past. They could send money to India- no problem, but not you guys.
I don't want money for my writings now. I want all of them to be free. But I am angry at Medium, and would never be returning.
It’s full of banners, popups and annoyances that is completely opposite of what you’d want in a site where you focus and learn something
While the posting experience is nice. Content discovery is terrible. Content monetization is even worse. I can't justify researching a post for hours for no reads and no money.
In particular for written content, the threshold for funding is low and the bar for execution is as well, which skirts a lot of the issues the actual Kickstarter has.
And if funding is anonymous, there isn't any direct issue with undue influence from benefactors.
There's a number of written pieces I'd happily pay to help bring into existence. And a number of other pitches that even if I wouldn't be interested in funding, I'd be interested in creating an account to vote up to increase visibility to those that would, and in both cases being notified when that content finally exists.
But I have very little interest in simply funding an author in general, or paying to access content when summaries of anything important will exist elsewhere, or even in wasting my time with free material that's over engineered towards clickbait and maximizing my scrolling to serve the most ads.
In particular, I'd love to fund a return of actual investigative journalism on topics I'd value.
We saw the short tail of this in action with Sanderson on the actual Kickstarter, but I definitely think there's a long tail model viability on a specialized platform for written content.
In any case, good luck with the new role.
Instead of a freelance writer pitching a story to an editor of the NYT, throw it up on a site where the pitches can be seen and funded directly by their potential audience.
If the NYT was going to pay a few hundred dollars for the article, that's a very low threshold for funding.
Obviously writers with a portfolio of past work will have an advantage in that system, but even fresh talent could build up a portfolio with interesting pitches at low funding goals.
A lot of content curation is built around a paradigm where the editors speculate about what their audience actually wants, and that's not always very accurate.
I recall a friend who wrote about sexual politics for major publications who had a hard time getting a pitch for a story on child free attitudes sold to the editor, and yet that piece ended up the most read and shared for the year.
Remove the middleman and allow writers to sell the pitch directly to the audience - who if they care about it enough will fund it and read it when finished. And then don't care about trying to control or hinder further distribution or handicapping the piece/headline to optimize clicks or ads.
Monetize the creation and not the distribution.
Somewhere I feel that when an author link to an article, that link is an invitation to consume the linked text. It just feels uncivilised to put out links and then not deliver on it.
That said, I was at one time a subscriber of LWN. The model there was that articles were subscriber only the first week, and then public after that. _Unless_ a subscriber decided to provide a link, then the article was also available for anyone following that link.
Perhaps thats a model that could work for Medium? If I ever get an rss-reader up, and start following sources again I could perhaps see my self pay a subscription for “early access” feeds (to support some pore journalist doing actual reporting if nothing else)
1) Allow creators to make content (Medium does great at this, Ev’s eye for product was key here, but always room to improve)
2) Match that content with the correct/largest possible audience, like how twitter has hashtags/trending, FB has the friend graph, and ultimately Tik Tok has the algorithm (Medium is awful at this and if I were you, I’d focus immediately on solving this).
I've been using Medium as a reader, writer, and subscriber for some years. And nowadays I am unconsciously not using Medium as much in profit of Substack and Ghost. My main draw to Medium as a writer was to reach lot of people. A random paywall means less reach. Not sure if max reach and paywall are reconcilable and solvable.
Fight the good fight I guess.
The Substack model is that you provide both content and audience, and they provide hosting and monetization tools. They're a service provider where only the author is their customer, and so they're able to focus exclusively on what the authors need.
This doesn't happen in practice. Like most marketplaces they have an incentive to market things that are popular or appear to be trending. That means in order for Medium to promote your article you need to do the marketing with your own audience or outlets to get eyeballs on the article and after Medium flags your article as popular it might get promoted.
This is a really big concept because it means if you're just starting off with no audience you might as well grow your own audience on your platform because most marketplaces like Medium (and others) aren't heavily promoting folks with no prior audience.
I remember putting some of my blog posts on Medium and setting the canonical URL back to my site. Out of the hundreds of thousands of visits my personal blog got I only had a few hundred total hits on Medium. That's because I didn't promote and drive my own traffic to Medium and in turn they didn't promote me.
This resulted in being able to build an audience that would read my work irrespective of whether I published with a publication.
That's not something I saw when I used Medium in 2018ish for some of my posts.
I know there was a partner program but that wasn't paying to get traffic to your posts. That was a mechanism to get paid based on how much engagement you had on your Medium articles. It's just another incentive to get you to drive your own traffic and audience to Medium to drive up Medium engagement. Basically helping Medium grow their business.
If you wanted to pay money to promote your content you can do that without Medium. You can buy ads on Google and other outlets then run ads to your blog posts. I don't do that personally but it's an option.
That suggests that Medium should be more reader-friendly than Substack, but it seems the opposite is true. I suspect that even when readers are nominally customers on Medium, they are really still just the product (in the sense of “if it’s free, you’re the product” — except it’s not free here).
In particular re Medium:
> On the backend, the way [Medium's] partner program works is that users’ membership fees are allocated proportionally to the writer based on how many articles the user read. Fine. Also there is something about clapping. I guess if I really like a writer I could make sure to read a lot of their articles so they can get some of that membership fee. But, as a consumer, I: a. can’t subscribe directly to the writer, and b. can’t signal that I value their content at more than $5 per month. No amount of claps can make up for that!
Writers and readers both don't get the right amount of value from their framework.
When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.
FWIW I don't like medium because it is unpredictably paywalled.
Its not available on the chrome store because of manifest V2, there is privacy redirect but its abandoned and doesn't support scribe.
“Medium.com” nowadays is a sign of low quality and I personally started skipping articles because of that alone.
Beyond that, Substack is currently positioning themselves as a platform/tool for content creators to create their own brand and market to their own audience. If you aren't paying attention, you might not even notice that your favourite author was on Substack; they're functionally a spiritual descendent of the independent blogs of old (who might be running on MT or Wordpress or whatever, but weren't a "Wordpress blog by Joe Smith", but "Joe Smith's blog" (which happens to be on Wordpress).
Medium has been positioning themselves as a content brand in their own right for some time; they have been undergoing relentless business model churn, but at various times they've had editorial teams, they've commissioned work, they've had writers on payroll, and they've had verticals or "editorial teams" or whatever such as OneZero, Forge, Marker, and Elemental. Those last I think were launched in 2019 and killed off in 2021; but functioned like magazines published by Medium with editors and staff writers. I'm not quite sure what todays strategy is, but it seems to still be focused on the publisher/magazine model where the brand is "Medium" and the author just gets a byline.
You can see this approach in terms of features like theming, URL structures, support for custom domains, etc. (Eg, Substack supports custom domains; Medium recently ended their support.)
You get a lot more interesting writers on board than Medium in that case. People who stick to the safe areas of thought don't make history (for good or ill).
Substack has to pay the "I'm being cancelled" blowhards huge sums to get them on the platform to begin with. They earn nothing from eyeball traffic; people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage. And even if they did, Substack would earn a tiny pittance from their fraction of subscription fees from that demographic.
So in those cases, Substack provided financing and made money on it in the end. I don't know if that's true on average, though.
The content creator doesn't fully trust the new publisher/platform, so they need upfront monetary assurance beyond a normal advance/royalty type deal, in case the platform fails. Likewise the platform values exclusives from big names that will drive demand for the platform. So the platform gives up potential upside to secure the exclusivity rights and the content creators get a premium.
I imagine there must be some authors out there who didn't mmet Substack's expectations, but they're apparently few and far between.
> people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage
Some prominent Substacks have tens of thousands of paying subscribers. Glenn Greenwald is apparently clearing (after Substack's fees), something like $100k USD/month. Matt Taibbi has even more paying subscribers, so will make even more; Andrew Sullivan is close behind. Last year Substack announced they had over 1 million paying subscribers (generally around $5-10/month), and the top 10 newsletters were at that point generating over $20m in revenue/year (ie, averaging over 2m each).
As it turns out, a non-trivial amount of people are willing to pay for writing, whatever the reason is.
Conversely, technical content doesn't do as well on Substack.
With Substack, I'm prompted to subscribe directly to newsletters from individual authors.
None of the authors I follow on Twitter tell me to subscribe to Mediums. A bunch of them point me towards their Substacks.
Do you think substack has some metric on "unsubstantiated opinions" that they're trying to maximize? Or have you just noticed more content that you disagree with there?
These are also features of Medium, maybe most blogs. Being discerning is also a required feature of the internet, regardless what one might dream of, imo.
I think the fact that YT hosts video makes it quite a different beast from Medium. Self hosting video is still quite difficult, and expensive. Hosting text is much cheaper and simpler.
This fact changes the game quite a bit.
They wish! Medium is Vimeo.
"I'm sure there are legal/fiduciary reasons you have to say that [you are going to sue Elon to force the acquisition], Bret. But if I was still on the board, I'd be asking if we can just let this whole ugly episode blow over. Hopefully that's the plan and this is ceremony."
https://twitter.com/ev/status/1545588839363727361?s=20&t=4g7...
Why would Twitter want to just let this all blow over? Elon did a ton of damage to the company and they have a good cause of action.
The board's responsibility to shareholders and other stakeholders in Twitter doesn't seem to enter his awareness — just everyone getting along, where everyone means a select crowd of entrepreneurs and investors.
Doesn't seem like Musk did any obvious damage.
That would mean a shrinking possibility of an already bungled acquisition going through is better than the status quo. Seems like Musk has kind of done Twitter a favor by shaking things up. Regardless of the acquisition, it has become clear that the market thinks there is a lot of potential here that's being wasted.
If I made a credible $100B offer for the Campbell Soup company and waived due diligence, the stock price would shoot up, but it's not because they're wasting their potential.
It is objectively better for investors because they get $54.20 a share instead of the current ~$34. It isn't a signal for anything else. Shareholders don't care what happens to Twitter as a company after that, because they have already sold their shares.
I don't think Twitter has much of a choice here. Suing Musk seems like a pretty big risk given his defense, and it doesn't even guarantee a payoff for the company. On top of that, the fallout from such a high-profile court case wouldn't be very good PR (arguably so even if Twitter wins), so the shareholders are probably in for a net loss if they fight it out in court. Plus, Elon could full-well just settle the $1B offer cancellation fee out of spite and Twitter wouldn't see a dime.
Elon definitely made a stupid and rash decision, but frankly, Twitter is an even dumber company. A bunch of bagholders trying to legally compel a multi-billionaire to buy them out doesn't make a very strong court case. I don't see this ending well for Twitter unless Elon really fumbles his defense.
This is not true. He can't just decide to pay $1B to get rid of it all.
What case law would suggest this being a bad idea? Musk voluntarily made himself the 2nd-biggest TWTR bagholder next to Vanguard.
In what sense? Will advertisers or users flee because of a court case? If anything, it keeps Twitter in the news. Their CEO could make any announcement today and have it reverberate across America as he could never have done before.
For a certain kind of formulaic, clickbaity, “who needs an editor” kind of content sure, it was popular, but for serious writing?
Sorry, nope, not even close, not even temporarily.
Substack at least can make a claim for serious journalism and opinion that’s hard to monetize elsewhere — much but not all of it heavily libertarian — but what, please, was Medium’s claim to gravity?
The highlight feature?
Twitter is still bad for the small guy. The algorithm is too bad. I know at least n people will find a tweet content really interesting, but I se k (<< n) likes. That frustrates me.
Blogger, Wordpress, Bear Blog: none of them makes your content visible to others like Medium does.
Those are the solutions that I like, because I don't want to do even little maintenance. And I want features like likes, comments, bookmarks, share buttons.
I posted to Bear Blog and Medium same content some weeks back. It is on an obscure topic. The Bear Blog one has two toasts, nobody reached out to me regarding it. On the Medium one, there are 13 unique claps, two thoughful comments, people saving my article to several lists.
I didn't have this with anything else, tbh.
I tried maintaining a site using Jekyll and hosted on GH pages. I don't even like that amount of maintenance.
I have research for org, self-research, books, family, physical activity, minor hacking projects. Really cannot find the time to fiddle with another thing.
Is a handful of additional comments worth the tradeoff?
Because Medium.com can decide at any time to tweak the knobs of their recommendation engine, and your admittedly low traffic could go straight down to Bear Blog levels. That is what happened to many people's Instagram accounts, as IG is now favouring organic posts from users that also pay for promoted posts...aka, servicing their real customers.
I'm not a medium fan either but my feelings are similar to the parent post. If it's something I want to persist then I will take the effort and add it to my jekyll site but that's few and far between. Medium works great for the 99% of long form content I want to publish.
I also have a pseudonymous Less Wrong account where I say unconventional, unpopular things. See, I don't earn money OR make a name.
I also write notes when I need- to Simplenote and Google Docs, and share the links with the people I see fit.
I don't measure anything serious or important to me regarding views or reach. They are just a nice bonus.
I wouldn’t even have that if not for Medium.
FB is where I can get the best reach. But I don't like the distribution of people there, and post seldomly with extremely curated visibility list of "friends". I am happy with 10 likes.
I also have an YT channel that helps people (edit: it's code and math). Very low effort channel with near-zero editing. I earn a penny or two.
As I said, don't care. Need low-maintenance stuff.
But in actuality I started getting - some shitcoin promoters - some wfh scams - click baity topics without much substance..
So I cancelled (which unfortunately only happens some months later..)
One one hand, they wanted to create the best writing and reading experience on the web, by investing heavily in product design, and manually curating and promoting quality writing that would be interesting to read.
On the other hand, they wanted to democratize publishing by making it easy to write and encouraging just anyone to get their ideas out onto the platform, regardless of how readable those writings were.
Subscribers that were willing to pay monthly for access to curated, thoughtful writing increasingly found a site filled with low-quality boilerplate. Established writers who had at first enthusiastically adopted Medium increasingly fled the site in order to protect their personal brands and reputations.
In the end, no one was happy, except mediocre clickbait writers. There wasn't enough subscription money to justify focusing entirely on quality, and ad-based models were too much in conflict with the platform goals for them to be able to make up the difference via scale.
I definitely don't think Medium has been a failure in its first 10 years. Quite the contrary --- they really did raise the bar for reading experiences across the web, and for a time, they did have the best and brightest writers churning out thoughtful, interesting content.
But it was an idea ahead of its time. Without established cultural and technical micropayments infrastructure (a situation which has seen practically no progress in these past 10 years), it was always going to be an uphill battle to fund the kind of experiences they wanted to create.
I doubt there will be many changes in this state of affairs during the next CEO's tenure. That said, I hope to be surprised, not just because it would be good for Medium, but because it would provide much-needed hope for the web as a whole. Our need for social platforms that care about empowering and educating people, rather than exploiting them, is even greater than it was 10 years ago. Perhaps Medium's next act can help rekindle that flame.
Unfortunately Medium slowly turned into a incredibly frustrating & hostile user experience. I haven't purposely clicked a Medium link in many years because of it. I empathize with how difficult it can be to generate revenue from online writing, but I wish they figured out a better way.
It's like the difficult part is not to initially build a cool and snappy web service, but manage to remain cool and snappy over a long period of time, when money seems to want you to build something not-cool and not-snappy.
Something Medium failed at. Yes, they managed to solve the easy part (start out cool and snappy) but they failed at the hard and valuable part (remain cool and snappy).
There are several aspects of that site in its heyday that I've yet to find really replicated elsewhere, particularly for longer text discussions.
There was very, very fine level of access control over who could see what which meant you could require CONTEXT to be a part of a group. In addition, tagging support was robust and NOT just a mixture of hashtags. So you could do things like, in a politics group, click 'Elections: 2004' and see, in chronological order, every post related to that topic in the group. This made actual search possible and cut down on reposts/recycled content, because things weren't just lost the minute they fell off the front page, etc.
Then again, screenshot culture wasn't really a big thing, yet. I don't think we could replicate some of what made LJ work anymore. It's sad.
Meanwhile, Medium failed to create any kind of boom at all, despite its clean UX. They just kept the marketing/analytics cruft out of the product JUST long enough to attract a large enough audience, and then jacked everything up to 11. Standard bait-and-switch for 'free' technology products these days.
History repeats itself. Medium.com was clean and cruft-free too, until it wasn't.
There once was a time when I wanted to earn from my writings, but not any more.
But their dishonesty makes it unlikely for me to reconsider them.
They said that they would start Partner Program (MPP) in India once Stripe started serving India.
Then Stripe became operational in Beta. They said, once Stripe comes out of Beta, they would start MPP in India.
Then Stripe came out of Beta. They just stopped mentioning India. They can serve Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Slovenia- and not India. That made me frustrated enough to stop using Medium.
I do not plan to go back, and I don't need money from writing anymore.
I made some money from Quora (you just have to sign W8-BEN, which is a 10 minute process) running Spaces, but somehow Medium never started MPP.
Their dishonesty made me angry.
Edit: they put a paywall on my writings by default even when they didn't pay me a dime.
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1193234501373005824
I haven't really kept up with Medium or the discourse around it at all since then. Have things changed meaningfully?
At this point, if you are still posting on Medium, you many want to consider moving to your own platform since some of the network effects that made posting on Medium a good proposition are dying off as a result.
Am I wrong and in fact Medium is doing well and Ev decided to get off whilst the going is good?
It is literally a waste of space for the 10 results you see on the first page of Google searches.
If you can't be bothered to self-host a blog, you can link your domain to your Medium publication (before May of this year this was free, and continues to be free for earlier users). You'd then have a free blog on a proper domain, with zero ads and you can even tweak the design with a few clicks to make it your own. Further, it comes with a comment system, followers, etc. It's easy to blog as the writing experience is quite excellent.
I think all of that combined is a lot of value, in particular for a casual blogger. And it doesn't cost a cent. To me, this counters the list of small UI annoyances. We've grown extremely entitled and cynical, I'm just trying to recognize value when I see it. Because certainly the value isn't zero.
The negative I have about Medium is that just like many other content services, they failed to solve the discovery problem. There used to be a lot of quality writing on Medium and there might still be a lot, but those writers are not recognized by the ranking/discovery algorithms. Instead, they are completely outclassed by people gaming the system.
Check any topic/category and see that most are flooded with low effort no-substance articles with click bait titles. Those people know how to work the algorithms, and they win.
So...noise goes to the top instead of quality. And for those quality writers to gain traction, they need to join the engagement hacking or find crickets.
It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up.
It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point.
I think its probably not a problem for the platforms, shorter content mean its easier to put advertisements and easier to recommend and manage.
Its a race to the bottom because now probably for the first time in history, social interaction is not made to be valuable or important, its made to be profitable.
Cafes and bars didn't control what you can say, and changed which topics are preferable and which aren't, obviously Social media does this and more.
So as long users exist, advertisers are paying to advertise, nothing really will change, and we are starting to see the affect of this in the world.
> It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point.
I think this really depends on the audience, and who you are targeting.
HN is totally the opposite from TikTok, yet it still grows, and blogs that get on the front page get a very large amount of traffic that almost any author would be happy with.
But in general, I agree everything became stupider because its a race to the bottom at this point.
If for a moment we would assume a very large group of qualitative "citizen journalists" regularly writing, together they'd produce a vast sea of high quality content. Medium at one point also onboarded actual pro publications, so you'd get a really great set of content that in volume would be the equivalent of several thousands of newspaper and in terms of quality be close, whilst being more diverse.
5$ per month for that pile of quality is a steal.
But for that to work, the quality has to be discoverable. You need to able to look at the homepage, and see top notch writing in the categories you're interested in. It would be a single place to do most of one's deeper reading, with seemingly no end. For very low costs.
None of that has worked out, for the reasons I mentioned.
I built my internal apps with full of JS but when it comes to website, No JS is the highest priority to me.
What becomes bad is when platforms (or people) think they're entitled to track you with said Javascript.
So let's be concise on "Free", i want "Free of JS", not free of charge.
Nobody is the product just because a website uses JS. You should be complaining about data collection, unnecessary tracking, data brokers all of which can be done without JS.
Very simplified, but the HTTP workflow is:
1. Client requests document (GET) at /hello_world from xyz.com
2. Server responds with status code and document (or empty)
The server absolutely has an opportunity to log any part of the request.