
Why Medium Failed to Disrupt the Media - walterbell
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-05/why-medium-failed-to-disrupt-the-media
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yladiz
Outside of the writing, I kind of don't like the design of Medium. I can't
quite put my finger on why, but it looks light but feels heavy (as a reader).
I also don't like that every post pretty much looks the same, with the
exception of the header image; with other blogging services you could style it
at least a little (for example, it's generally obvious when a blog is on
blogspot, but there are times when I didn't know until I searched and noticed
the URL. Tumblr is very customizable too.) I even prefer Livejournal's
interface as a reader to Medium's.

As others have pointed out too, it didn't seem to get past the 'hipster SV
writer, dad, astronaut, all around awesome sauce' style writing and
showboating aspect. You can do that on other platforms too (add the tag line
and write the typical 'Medium way') but it feels like on Medium it's really
uncommon to see a post from someone who doesn't add too much to the tag line.

Medium would have to get over this mentality and make it more appealing for
regular writers, not just appeal with the interface, if it were to become
bigger.

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CM30
> No business model that involves selling content can get around a fundamental
> fact: Content can only be consistently good if its creators can make a
> living from it.

Not really. And this is probably why the 'professional' media is having so
much trouble.

Because there are lots of people out there who are willing to provide high
quality for free on a regular basis, and it makes people hesitant to spend
money on the same from those trying to sell it.

All that high quality content being available for free is exactly why written
content has so little value any more and why platforms can't monetise it.
Because there will always be people willing to provide their work for less
money than you.

~~~
ice109
the keyword is "consistently"

~~~
petra
That's just a problem of finding the good stuff, we have many tools for
that(search, recommendations, curation, etc) and i think it's the place we
could improve - for example if Google(or someone else) had an option to filter
for in-depth, quality content - that wold be very useful.

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andraganescu
You gotta wonder about the whole vision speech. It would have been a better
service to the world to explain where exactly did the idea get stuck: not
enough volume, wasn't the platform big enough, is it a technology issue (ad
management, the cms), was is the corrupt budget managers of various brands ...
idk.

This whole bla bla "our vision is to be the saint content liberators" is a
both funny and completely useless. It is not to say that Ev has no inner drive
or that Medium is a company that doesn't stick to their mission or vision, but
it is just that they communicate:

\- hey we tried to do better \- they didn't let us \- we're leaving

WTF :)

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newscracker
I liked how this article described about monetization approaches and compared
with other options (like Blendle). Any kind of content - be it writing or TV
shows or movies - will remain tough to sell individually because nobody wants
to spend their entire pay check on all these. Only some kind of aggregation
and advertising (consumer money flowing back to producing content without the
consumers realizing it or directly paying for it) have proven to work somewhat
well.

I'd be interested in ad-free and ad-tracking-free options that provide more of
a buffet kind of system than an à la carte option (the latter is what Blendle
is trying with micropayments that don't actually look micro enough). But
scaling this with millions or billions of customers to reduce base costs is
not easy, especially for written content, compared to TV shows or movies (like
what Netflix, Amazon and others are doing).

~~~
woodandsteel
The article says the problem with Blendie is you have to make a decision for
every article. What if the default was you paid a micropayment on an article
if you just had it open for more than, say, 30 seconds, and in the relatively
rare cases where you didn't want to pay you could hit a button to stop it. I
think that would eliminate maybe 90% of the decisions and make it a lot more
attractive.

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newscracker
On Medium as a platform, somehow, to me it always seemed like a place for
pompous people to write long articles ("Hey, look! I'm published on Medium!").
But like the rest of the web, there were many time wasters among the few gems.

I did like the typography and readability initially (and still do), but some
of its design decisions, like blurred images coming into focus on scrolling,
almost seizure inducing flashing GIFs and others really annoyed me a lot and
put me off from visiting Medium links.

Lastly, it also bothered me that it could become one more large scale platform
like Blogger or WordPress, concentrating content into one platform (many
people wrote directly on and for medium.com, while a few used it with custom
domains).

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ReverseCold
Random cool thing:

They control a .gov (kinda)

greatagain.gov

