10 Years of Medium: from creation, Growth, Transformation to Finding new purpose

原文标题：《 Medium 成功了吗? 》

原文作者： Nathan Baschez， Every

RR

This article is from wechat official account:Old yuppie

Ten years after founding Medium, Ev Williams has stepped down as the company's CEO.

Reaction to the news from experts ranged from silence to criticism. Medium has gotten a bad portrayal in the media over the past decade, as the company has repeatedly changed strategy, often affecting its employees and users.

We may have seen the culmination of that narrative this week:

Casey Newton gives up his claim that "Ev Williams gives Up" and he gives up his right to return to traditional media and to write his Substack newsletter.

Casey's piece is a classic retelling of the traditional version of the Medium story: they controlled too much and cheated the authors, they raised too much money, and they failed to achieve their overly ambitious goals of fixing the Medium. There's a lot that's right about this story, but the full truth is more interesting and complicated. This article is worth reading for those who want to know how traditional publishers and open platforms collide, why so many well-meaning efforts to "save the media" seem to end in disappointment, and what happens next for writers and readers on the Internet.

I don't have any inside information about Medium, but I've been a close observer and user since the beginning, and I was an early employee of their main competitor, Substack. So I thought now would be a great opportunity to write a Medium story from my perspective.

First, let's go back to the beginning.

Medium was created to solve the content discovery problem

In August 2012, Ev published an article introducing Medium to the world. In it, he recommends three reasons for writers to use Medium:

1. A focused writing experience

2. Collaboration tools (e.g. Google Docs-style reviews)

3. Use curation and algorithms to recommend your articles to new readers

The first reason is that the user experience of writing is a classic example of a product wedge. Come for the tools, stay for the web. Even if no one you know uses Medium, you'll probably want to publish there for a focused writing experience and overall quality design.

But this one feature alone is easy to copy. That's where the next two selling points come in. By setting up a comment system, they created a reason for writers to share Medium drafts with their friends to pull them online. By making recommendations to new readers, it creates a potential network effect, where more readers lead to more authors, and more authors lead to more readers.

For many writers, Medium at the time felt a bit like TikTok and YouTube did for video creators when they were starting out. This is very exciting and new in 2012. I still remember the excitement when I was invited to the test. My first post was seen by thousands of people.

I can't go back to Wordpress.

It worked

In the years that followed, millions of people on Medium read stories published by hundreds of thousands of authors. They have attracted just about every celebrity and organization you can imagine, including the president of the United States.

I think this is mainly due to one main reason: you can publish an article without starting a blog.

This makes Medium an ideal place for people who have something to say but don't want to keep committing. That's great! But there's a problem: that's why Medium is known as the Internet's PR dump. Any time anyone wants to promote anything, they post about it on Medium.

To make matters worse, there are beginning to be more and more signs of quality problems. This isn't a problem unique to Medium, but sleazy titles often come off as frustrating. Just as people complain about embarrassing self-help posts on Twitter now, people were upset about the Medium self-help post back then.

According to an article published in 2015, the top 10 Medium posts are:

Welcome to Medium

37 of the best websites for learning something New

How did quitting my corporate job for my entrepreneurial dream ruin my life

8 things everyone should do before 8 a.m

7 Things You Need to Stop Doing to Be More Productive

33 Websites that will make you a genius

How to Lose Weight in 4 Easy Steps

Advice from my 30-year-old self to my 20-year-old self

The intersection of ought and must

Seven refused to

Anyway, in order to "raise the average" of works on their platform, Medium hires journalists and writers to write for them, and even has a strategy of getting people to create entire professional magazine-type publications on their platform. Some of the resulting work was truly surprising, but it also cost a lot of money and quickly became a problem.

I think we all know what happened next.

They switched to subscriptions

In 2017, Medium shut down their advertising business and shifted their strategy to a subscription business. It turned out to be a rather prescient move.

If they continue down the path of advertising, then all the clickbait and low-quality content they're struggling to address will have a pretty strong incentive to thrive on the platform. The theory is that by moving to subscriptions, there will be less reward for publishing a lot of shallow content and more reward for publishing more manageable deep interesting content that can reach a wider audience and start encroachment on the territory of book publishers and magazines.

The goal is to start a Netflix-like virtuous cycle, where subscription revenue can fund new work by world-class writers and journalists, which will create more subscription revenue, and so on. This sounds like a good cycle in theory, the challenge is to make it work in practice.

Their paywall works in a unique way. Anyone can post anything on Medium for free, but you can also choose to put your story behind their paywall and get paid. How much you get paid depends on how many times people click the "clap" button, among other variables.

The advantage of this system is its low cost and simplicity. You don't have to launch anything, design a coherent value proposition, or even get anyone to pay you. Medium does that for you, all you have to do is check a box. This easy-to-use approach is reminiscent of Medium's initial success: just as you can post an article without having to start a blog, you can also add an article to a paywall without having to launch a subscription media product.

The question is: What kind of writers can Medium attract by establishing the easiest, rather than the best, way to make money writing online? Moreover, the value proposition to the reader is always ambiguous. What kind of stories do you get when you become a subscriber? Why are they worth paying for? Who is it for?

The answer then (and now) seemed to be: all kinds of stories, for everyone.

Such broad value propositions often don't work, especially for something as cheap to produce and expensive to consume as writing. But Medium seems to have built a pretty good subscription business out of it! That's not surprising -- especially if you consider their reported $600 million valuation -- but it's a lot better than most people realize.

This may come as a surprise to some, and although they may not be growing as fast, I estimate that Medium is actually making more money than Substack. At the beginning of 2021, Medium said it had 725,000 paying subscribers, which equates to about $43 million, of which 50% was reportedly paid to authors, leaving the company with more than $21 million in revenue. And Substack is said to have made $9 million in 2021. So even if my estimate is biased, that's a pretty healthy margin of safety.

The Medium subscription business has two key drivers:

1. Huge funnel top. They've been churning out articles for nearly a decade, and their constant display on Google and elsewhere has helped them reach 170m monthly users.

2. Excellent acceptance rate. Medium keeps 50% of its revenue, as opposed to Substack's 10%, because they drive author discovery. All you have to do on Medium is publish, and you have a chance to make money. On Substack, you bring in your own readers, which gives writers more power to leave, and therefore more pricing power.

There's a downside to this fantastic acceptance rate, though, and that's the quality of writers willing to put a lot of effort into Medium subscriptions. The most valuable authors seem to be mostly choosing to publish through traditional publications, or platforms like Substack or Ghost, ConvertKit, etc. It turns out that creating the easiest way to make money writing online doesn't necessarily mean you'll get the best articles. As with most media types, most of the value of writing comes from clicks, and Medium doesn't seem to have that value.

So now it seems that their dream flywheel of Medium using subscription revenue to attract good writers, and good writers to attract subscription revenue, is no longer accelerating.

Where have all the good writers gone?

One theory is that Substack ate Medium's lunch, but I don't think so yet. The vast majority of revenues generated by all forms of writing still go to the top publishing companies: newspapers, magazines, book publishers, etc. The New York Times is thriving. So does Bloomberg and many other subscription publications. Book publishers are playing it safe - most of their authors have yet to move directly to Amazon or elsewhere. Even Substack, which has much more momentum than Medium, is attracting fewer big-name writers than it did a few years ago. (They don't report detailed metrics like "new writer earnings," just my take)

We have now entered the "creator economy" craze. If we compare the shape of this curve to the adoption of personal computers, the Internet, smartphones, etc., it may not look that interesting.

Why is that?

Of course, this could be a lull until these online platforms find the next way to unlock, much like Substack came up with Substack Pro in 2020, which helped them attract indie writers they'd never considered before. But there is something odd about the current period of stability. You'd think more writers would go where they can make the most money and have the most control. And some people do. But that's not the majority.

Why is that? Independence is not the only thing that matters to writers.

Here are a few examples:

1. Get. It's hard to reach out to a few random celebrities, say you write on Medium or Substack, and ask them to take the time to chat with you about stories. To be clear, it's not impossible, but you need to be fairly successful and have already established your brand in order for it to work. And in the case of writing for established publications, even new authors enjoy a level of baseline access that far exceeds the resources available to the authors themselves.

2. Venture capital. When you get a job at a newspaper or magazine, they will pay you a salary. When you sign a book deal, you get an advance. If your work turns out to be popular, you have leverage to ask for more money. But what if your work isn't that popular at first? Unfortunately, this is the most common case. If you struggle on the Internet alone, you will have to do something other than writing to make a living. But when you have a publisher, you can hold out a little longer. Publishers are like venture capital for writers. They bet early to give people a chance.

3. Prestige. Maybe that will change in the future, but being published by an established institution still means something to a lot of people. Seeing their book in a bookstore or their name on the front page of The New York Times is a lifelong aspiration for many writers -- even if some might think it unreasonable.

4. Support. Creating an independent writing business on the Internet involves something more than just writing. When you work for a traditional publisher, they handle everything for you -- pictures, fact-checking, text editing, legal, liability insurance, etc. Not to mention social media, paid user acquisition, events and conferences, gifts, and more.

And that's not even counting the most important advantage publishers have right now: reaching their audiences.

I deliberately left this out because both Medium and Substack offer it, and online platforms could theoretically provide more distribution than traditional publications. But the reality is that traditional publishers currently outperform online platforms, at least when it comes to writing. (The same cannot be said for videos.)

Sacrificing some independence to work with a traditional publisher obviously has its drawbacks, but based on the fact that more writers still haven't escaped, the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages for most writers.

What's next for Internet publishing?

Of these value propositions, the most important is being able to compete with traditional publishers. Substack has expressed interest in offering many of these services to writers through their "Pro" product, but as far as I can tell, it's not quite there yet. I'm curious if Medium will try to go that route.

Then there are new attempts, like my company Every, which tries to combine the strength and control of independent writing with the distribution and support of traditional publishers. But we are still very small.

At the same time, Substack shows signs of developing a network effect that is not entirely dependent on algorithmic recommendations of content. As I have written before, there is a tension between their ideology and their commercial motives, and it will be interesting to see how they navigate this. But I think they have a good chance of creating the first true youtube-style writing network. Maybe everyone, even big media companies, will post videos on YouTube instead of on their own sites, and maybe one day writing can exist in a walled central garden.

So is Medium a success?

The question is: Succeed in what? There was a lot of lofty early talk about fixing the attention systems that feel dysfunctional on the Internet, and I think it's clear that those systems will be as strong as ever. But is there any other reasonable expectation?

Medium raised a lot of money in the early stages of its rapid growth, and it may be hard for those investors to consider Medium a financial slam. But a lot of things do -- especially if you're doing something related to writing. I think those investors probably know that. What they expect from entrepreneurs is not a guarantee of success, but courage and hard work. And from what I can tell from the public tweets, they all seem very happy to support Ev and the team.

No one can argue that Medium hasn't worked hard to get the model right over the past 10 years. You can accuse it of indecision or vagueness, but I see it another way. I think it's a story about trying to do something really hard, about holding yourself to the highest standard imaginable, and refusing to give up and not letting things run their course even when things get tough.

I'm sure many negatively affected employees and customers may find this debate distasteful. But what more can we ask of entrepreneurs? Do we really want to live in a culture where people are afraid to try new things or change directions because they will be ashamed? What can customers and employees reasonably expect from the startups they choose to work with? If you're joining a startup, you have to know that there's a good chance the company will fail or veer in a direction that makes your service unnecessary. If you decide to use a startup's software, you obviously have to take some risks. If you're not interested in that kind of risk, go work for Google or use Wordpress!

Of course, I don't know all the details here. I'm not writing this post to defend everything Ev or Medium did. What I'm trying to say here is that this is much more complex and interesting than Casey Newton's article.

It's easy to scoff at the way the story ends, and it's likely that Medium will never move as quickly or attract as much hype as it did in the past. But it's not a 100% done deal, and I think it's good to have a new CEO at the helm with a new vision and new energy. I still support them.

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