CEO Tony Stubblebine shares how Medium went from the brink of shutting down to being profitable for almost a year now. “In 2022, Medium was losing $2.6M each month. We were also losing subscribers…”
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Medium should have named their paid plan "Large"
The fact that they platform some really objectionable types doesn’t have anything to do with the turnaround, does it?
Isn't that almost always the case? We've seen it happen to SO many platforms at this point, it feels like an inevitability... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Saved some money by using an AI generated image.
I came here for this comment.
I really wanted to read this with a full load of positive appreciation, but I get the very real sense that—however blunt the author claims to be and however much harrowing detail he narrates on the way to celebrating a positive outcome—there's more to this story, and some of it has to do with the voices they allow to use their platform.
I have plenty of respect for Ev Williams for paying such close attention to internet utility that he helped create two incredibly sticky platforms that had to use ads to be profitable. I think it's the only way you can profit off of other people's free labor, and it's a "democratization" of the way all profitable media has worked historically (previous media profited off of paid (and unpaid and underpaid) labor). Note that this article specifically highlights that they want their creative base to be "amateur" writers. How can one read this as anything other than "underpaid"?
I do think it is incredibly telling that this article that references "quality" and "good" writing but never tells us what that means. These are incredibly vague words, especially when the author brags that he successfully took 2% of the platforms views with his "publications" which thrived in the era he calls "swamped with get-rich-quick trash" and "flooded with never ending get-rich-quick schemes." LOL!
I looked over his posts pre-CEO and don't find it materially different from what he laments as "find a Wikipedia article, put a viral headline on it, rewrite the content as breathlessly hyperbolic broetry, profit". I believe that he did actually write stories that weren't that, but buddy, they don't look that different.
I am an amateur writer. I've printed zines, posted on every platform since Compuserve, including still having (old, poorly written) things on Blogger (thanks, Ev), and even once made $5 in the giving out money era of Medium. That represents about 1% of my total income from writing in 30+ years, and I have no complaints. But this article did nothing to convince that Medium is any different than any other monetized platform.
Just more reminder to move all my writing to my own site.
Credit where it's due, my most popular piece of writing on the internet (many dozens of reads, posted in 2017) is on Medium, though I have an expanded draft that I intend to publish as a short e-book eventually (maybe 10th anniversary if I'm realistic). This was posted, however, when I was a paying member, so they gave your posts, especially ones longer than 2000 words, more recommends. I was a paying member because I believed in the platform and have a good friend that is a family friend of Ev Williams.
Funny, I was just thinking about Medium yesterday and how I rarely see links to it anymore. So many writers have moved to Substack or maybe LinkedIn I would have assumed that Medium was barely alive.
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