
Inside Medium's Meltdown - JumpCrisscross
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-meltdown-of-evan-williams-startup-medium-2017-2
======
epberry
I'm guessing I read several Medium articles a month. Some of them are really
well produced - Transit's engineering post on beautifying their maps, Remix's
post about public transportation planning and ILP, and Karpathy's post on
backprop come to mind. So I hope Medium sticks around because I get a lot of
value out of them. Would I pay for this value? I think I actually would, but
maybe only for stories I finish and think are good. For example I would pay a
lot for the stories above but I would almost rather Medium pay me for posts
which turn out to be thinly veiled marketing that I stop reading halfway
through (I realize Transit's and Remix's posts could be construed as such but
hey, the technical content was deep). I suppose a flat fee is better for the
business but I could be more convinced to plunk down the credit card at the
beginning if I was charged based on usage, like time spent reading on the
site.

Also, let me just take a moment to once again rage against Business Insider
for writing a pretty bad article. The whole thing seemed purposefully
antagonistic and full of sarcastic language. Maybe it's because BI is the
exact type of operation Medium is trying to kill, but I think those MAU
numbers actually warrant some optimism! To be fair, Medium probably should
have provided some people to counterbalance all those angry publishers...

~~~
Baeocystin
Have you heard of [https://blendle.com/](https://blendle.com/) ? They brand
themselves as 'Spotify for journalism', with a pay-per-article approach, with
an instant refund if you don't like the article. I only started using them a
couple of days ago, so I don't have any further useful comment, but it seems
like a promising approach.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
I just don't think there are enough people in America right now with any extra
money to spend on articles. The middle class has to worry about paying for
food and necessities. Millennials can't afford cable, and people think they
will pay for internet articles they are used to getting for free? That
business model is doomed from day one.

~~~
mercer
I'm surrounded by millennials, and most of the pay for Spotify and Netflix, or
share an account with family members.

Furthermore, while I'm not 'poor', I'm quite frugal, and yet I've spent quite
a bit of money already on Blendle articles.

The biggest hurdle in my case was signing up and connecting my account to a
payment system. But once that barrier was crossed, paying somewhere between 10
cents and 1 euro on a article became a (concerning) easy thing to do. I
suspect I'm not alone in this.

------
kartickv
I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's
terrible UX:

\- Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India,
latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading
only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first
make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades.

\- I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to
his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts, but I found them
interspersed with his comments on other posts, posts he recommended, random
snippets of text in other posts he highlighted. Again, every other blog gets
this right — go to the top-level page of the blog, and you get a list of posts
in that blog.

\- Commenting is bad. To sign in to Medium with a Medium account, it emails me
a link to sign in. For every single comment I post. I don't want so many
emails. Ideally, they should just use Disqus, so I don't have yet another
account.

\- In any case, after logging in, the box where I should type a comment wasn't
clickable.

\- When I opened a second Medium post just a few minutes later, I was again
signed out, so couldn't comment.

\- There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen
area. Scrolling in a smaller screen area is irritating.

\- Comments and posts are mixed up. I'm reading the comment on a post, and it
says there are two responses, so I click that, and I'm suddenly taken away
from the comments I'm reading. I never know on Medium whether a click will
yank me away from what I was reading.

As you can see, Medium breaks a lot of things that were working with every
other blog for many years. Please, if you want to innovate, make sure you
don't already break what is the norm. That would be like making an
"innovative" car that doesn't have seatbelts.

If this is considered "idealistic", I don't mind them failing.

~~~
geoka9
> There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen
> area.

That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly)
survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced
reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen)
persistent header...

~~~
glitchdout
It's even worse when it's a sticky header. In those cases when you hit the
"Page Down" key the content is covered by the header and you have to press
"Up" a few times to read it.

------
whack
Personally, I respect Ev more for his decision to put on the brakes, even when
Medium seemed to be a financial success. We already have enough blogging
platforms. We really don't need yet another one.

Ev Williams' mission to change the way journalism is funded and operated
though, that's a truly noble ideal. Yes, it's likely too ambitious to succeed.
Yes, it's a moonshot. But it's exactly the kind of moonshot that Silicon
Valley needs to be taking. It's exactly the kind of moonshot that the world
could really benefit from. I applaud him for his decision to put his unicorn
at risk, in order to build something that could truly change the world.

~~~
navs
He could have done that with a lot more tact - informing publishers and
employees. He's non-confrontational - ok. Hire someone that isn't. Moonshots
carry a risk and it's not all his risk. It's the investors, the users, the
employees as well.

~~~
boozywoozy
Well said. Hindsight is 20-20 though. I imagine it's not easy to make the
right calls when one is in the driver's seat.

My takeaway: It's freaking hard to be CEO.

~~~
mgkimsal
Letting employees know they're getting laid off before they read about it
somewhere else isn't really one of the great mysteries of life, and doesn't
take decades of CEO/executive experience to figure out. It's sort of a basic
human decency thing. It shouldn't be that hard to be a decent human being.

------
morgante
This doesn't surprise me, based mostly on the occasional conversations I've
had with Medium employees (all of whom raved about their jobs, by the way).

Medium seems to fall into a growing group of companies that are more
interested in innovating on their management/internal politics than actually
creating innovative products. (Buffer, which also had layoffs and management
departures, is another example.) They're very invested in trying new
management frameworks like holacracy and signaling a commitment to things like
transparency or diversity. This is all well and good (plenty of very
successful companies have innovated on internal structures as well).

The problem is when it becomes the entire emphasis of the company. If you look
at what people's priorities are, it seems like they're more interested in the
company than the product. You can't have two P0s and until you have a
successful and profitable product, that _needs_ to be your P0. [0]

[0] Unless you can fund things indefinitely off your personal brand and net
worth.

------
ThomPete
I think the problem with journalism is that it was never the actual business.
What it was, were supporting and adding sophistication to the news industry,
but it was never actually central to the business. But the value of news was
that it didnt used to be widely available. That was actually what people paid
for. The news, not the journalism. And so what we see are all these people in
the news industry trying to improve their business by improving journalism.

~~~
Lazare
Don't forget classified ads either. Historically the rule of thumb is that
subscriptions and newsstand sales would more-or-less cover the cost of ink and
paper. Ads (and especially classified ads, which were an enormous money
spinner) paid for the actual journalism.

The moment the internet gutted ad revenue, this stopped being viable.

As you say, journalism made the news prestigious, but the news didn't actually
make money either; it was just there to get eyeballs onto the ads.

~~~
ThomPete
I would disagree somehow. You are right that classified makes money. However;
news was not freely available as it is today and thus I would say that news
was actually something people used to pay for. It was not as lucrative as the
classified but it was a major contributor to people actually buying
newspapers. They simple did not have another choice if they wanted to know
what was going on.

~~~
Lazare
> It was not as lucrative as the classified but it was a major contributor to
> people actually buying newspapers. They simple did not have another choice
> if they wanted to know what was going on.

Yes, absolutely. But the point is that while maybe people wouldn't have bought
a newspaper that didn't have news, _they still weren 't willing to pay for the
news component_. When offered a choice between not having news and paying the
actual cost if providing it, people have always opted against paying for it.

An obvious analogy is search engines. It's a useful and valuable service, but
so far, users have not been willing to pay for the cost of providing one.
Every search engine exists either as a loss making venture _or_ is used as
traffic/data generation for something profitable which cross-subsidises it.
(Even DDG is profitable only due to their ads.)

------
keypusher
If they are going to a subscription or patronage model, they will need to cut
way more jobs and costs. That type of model can work but you have to run very
lean, and you might end up replacing those ad banners with ones begging for
money. Organizations like NPR and Wikipedia are some of the largest to use
such a model, they have the benefit of goodwill and tax breaks due to their
non-profit status, and their cost structure and business model looks very
different from most valley startups. You can kiss that valuation goodbye.

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
The model here isn't NPR or Wikipedia, it's Patreon and Twitch.

The former is traditional philanthropy, but the latter is an interactive way
to support content creation. I'm not saying that those models will necessarily
translate to Medium, but that certainly seems to be the idea.

I urge anyone that's curious to go give Twitch a quick look. Spend a good half
hour in a few different channels. It's really interesting. Some of the streams
are what you would expect: skilled gamers playing at a high level. But many of
them are very creative in how the develop a community, how they interact with
viewers and chat, and what sort of entertainment experience they provide. I
think that most people will 'get it' if they watch for a bit. It's compelling
entertainment, and lots of people are willing to throw a lot of money at it.

The point is that it's just an entirely different phenomenon from
philanthropy. NPR and Wikipedia really have no place in this discussion
because they are so different.

------
avocade
The usual sensationalistic headline, but the gist of the story is crystal
clear: ads and writing is an inherent and probably impossible-to-solve
conflict of interest.

The media that won't change their business model during the next couple of
years will probably be extremely diminished in quality, and thus influence.
Can't wait.

(And no, the latest fad of "native advertising", with ads disguising as
articles, is not the answer. Hopefully this will fall to the wayside as more
people learn critical thinking and sourcing [I don't see much evidence for
this yet but I'm very hopeful ;) ])

But, the risk of losing the cadre of serious journalists at the large outlets
that today are struggling, and who rightfully demand a good salary for their
critical work (as members of the fourth estate), is a real one which needs to
be solved. If Medium can be a part of forging a new way ahead, then more power
to Ev. Haters always gonna hate, often without much thought, self-reflection,
or humility.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Ads + Writing worked just fine for most of the last century when print was the
only option.

The dead elephant in the room is the fact that the online ad experience is the
most irritating and least useful ad experience in all of history.

I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend
the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing.

The ads are completely useless to me, because I'm no longer interested in
buying A Certain Thing. The ads are useless for the advertiser, because
they're paying for nothing. And the ads themselves are usually animated and
irritating anyway.

Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to
be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.

The online ad industry has _never_ understood the difference between adding
value to readers and repeatedly smacking them around the head in a misguided
attempt to force them to click the BUY NOW button.

Medium missed the point of all this. The content varies from outstanding to
not so good, the design is great. But it's a bit late to be thinking about
monetisation, because now it's just replaying the mistakes made by every other
media platform over the last decade and a half.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I
> spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing.

Yeah Google ads are awful now. The best bang for your bank, ads wise? Facebook
and Super Bowl commercials.

> Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like
> to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially
> interesting.

When was the last time you purchased a product with print ads? I used to
subscribe to a ton of magazines a little over a decade ago but cancelled them
all because for every 1-2 articles of content there were 3-4 ads. It got to
the point where I could finish a magazine, cover to cover, in minutes because
of how many ads were in there.

~~~
bambax
Amazon ads are no better, and for the exact same reason. I'm old enough to
remember when Amazon first appeared, everyone was talking about how they were
going to be able to make magic suggestions. Turns out, all the magic is just
telling you to buy again what you JUST BOUGHT.

Netflix recommendation engine isn't amazing either -- except that, in the case
of Netflix, I often like to watch a show a second time.

------
kristianc
What actually happened to the ideal of rewarding content based on 'attention
minutes'?

My experience of Medium is that the content that gets surfaced is from people
who are already 'notable' in some other way (think that Medium allowing you to
import your Twitter followers and have then auto follow you on Medium doesn't
help this), and low value Steve Jobs self-help bullshit.

I can buy into curating 'hidden gems' using data in the way Spotify does, I
can get behind breaking unheard voices, but I can't see how the current model
of giving famous people a megaphone was ever going to upend journalism.

~~~
snarf21
I've really enjoyed some of the articles I've read on Medium and would love to
support the authors. However, one of the hardest things is finding other
similar or interesting articles. I'd pay a monthly fee for a list of
daily/weekly articles that ML or user like me recommend. I love to learn but
the hard thing is sometimes finding the new thing to learn about.

------
Thaxll
I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress? I still don't understand
how very simple business like that can raise hundred of millions...

~~~
whorleater
> I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress

Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the
websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you
slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of
web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and
websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a company that claims to
displace Wordpress it's not unthinkable for it to raise hundreds of millions.

~~~
wmeredith
You're conflating two very different things. WordPress.org is open source
software that runs a substantial portion of the modern web and do all those
things you say. WordPress.com is a hosted blogging SaaS like Blogger. Medium
is a WordPress.com competitor, a very important distinction.

~~~
cowsandmilk
The point remains; given the size of Automattic/Wordpress.com, it is very
understandable how a wordpress.com competitor founded by the creator of
blogger could raise large sums of money.

------
microcolonel
I deliberately avoid using ambitious publishing platforms. I don't think this
is an industry where you can grow your revenue without defeating the purpose
of the product. This is an industry where you have to survive on tight
margins, and figure out how to reliably provide the service longer than your
users live without losing your wife. It's not glamorous, but there is no other
way to offer a platform worth publishing on.

If your business is going to fail after less than a decade of hubris and
greed, then why not use any other blog platform?

------
paulcole
>Medium was a "dream job."

well they were half right

------
bigtunacan
From the article, "industry insiders have growing doubts about Williams'
business judgment and are starting to say the company is his vanity project"

This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being
post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still
a vanity project.

~~~
x0x0
The difference with twitter is they could fire their way to profitability.

2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing
$.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B).

Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably
profitable.

2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and
financials available:
[https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm](https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm)

edit: thanks @mastazi

~~~
bigtunacan
While the scale is different I don't see that the underlying issue is.

What you are suggesting about making Twitter profitable (which I happen to
agree with) seems to be what they are attempting to do at Medium with these
layoffs.

An aside on the Twitter front though; at this point I'm not sure cost slashing
is going to help their stock prices at this point even if they turn a profit
as they are already showing declining revenues.

~~~
x0x0
A prerequisite to the cut-your-way-to-profitability plan is income. There's no
evidence Medium had much income.

~~~
bigtunacan
Can you provide evidence there is no income? They aren't a publicly traded
company so I haven't seen their earnings reports...

~~~
x0x0
It's a personal guess, based on knowledge of the ad market, inferences from
their firing decisions, and gossip from some friends who know people there.

------
transfire
As a blogging platform I'd be happy to pay a few dollars a month, but no more.
I look at other platforms like Ghost, who want $20/mo, and I wonder who in
their right mind signs up for it. You can host your own site for far less.

~~~
inopinatus
That rather depends how you value your time w.r.t the opportunity cost of
doing other things. Valuing my marginal time with a purely internal cost
metric of $500ph, that $20 equates to a tipping point of 2.5 minutes a month
on the complete hosting setup & management. Since it will invariably take more
than that even amortized over a year it's a no-brainer: I'm okay with paying
for blog hosting, assuming it's a service offering the same capabilities and
quality level I'd build for myself.

NB: I receive no additional value clawed back from DIY since I do not desire
any additional experience with building, configuring, securing, managing,
monitoring and maintaining web servers and/or content management systems.

------
dpweb
I view Medium not like a news or blog, but at its best - like the OpEd page of
a major newspaper. Medium destroys the average newspaper website experience -
ad crazy garbage everywhere.

They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles.

For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write
regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some
powerful figures like that - retired, out of political offce. Meanwhile they
should be also finding the young important voices of the future, who can be
had cheap at this point.

~~~
subpixel
"why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer"

Colin Powell on retainer will make Medium money how?

~~~
a3n
As it is, I never go directly to Medium, I only read their articles when an
aggregator like HN links to it. If Powell wrote for them, then some percentage
of those random visits I'd go "huh. Colin Powell."

~~~
subpixel
This is the classic "1% of Colin Powell" fallacy.

------
puranjay
> "It comes down to how dysfunctional the place was,"

I'm not an insider by any means, but right from the early days of Twitter, I'd
heard this word - dysfunctional - to describe Twitter a lot too. All those
"fail whales" and strange and sometimes sheer dickish moves (like pulling API
access to developers) were just inexplicable.

------
pryelluw
I feel medium would have a chance if they allowed video and audio content to
be published there. They already have the users that produce such content.
Imagine it like a youtube/soundcloud for adults (I don't mean pornographic
content). They could then sell many products and services around it.

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
First, I'd love for Youtube to see more competition.

But, honestly what Youtube are you using? Despite the glut of kid-oriented
content on the site, I see almost none of it. The hobby scene alone is a huge
segment of the site and caters more to the 30-60 bracket than any other.

~~~
detaro
Before you find "your corner" of YouTube it looks pretty bad. I get slightly
annoyed/confused every time I see the front page without being logged in.

------
lkrubner
This bit:

"And the move infuriated some of Medium's publishers, who were not warned and
had bet their livelihoods on Medium and the business model Williams was
ditching."

This reminds me very much of when Dave Winer very suddenly shut down
weblogs.com. I remember everyone was furious with him then. The rage was
personal back then, as the group of people who were weblogging was smaller,
and the folks on weblogs.com tended to be the tech elite, many of whom knew
Winer personally.

------
johnbellone
First of all, thoughts go out to everyone laid off. If there are any SRE/SWE
looking to work on ops problems in the Washington/New York areas hit me up.

I really really wanted medium to be successful. Over the past several years I
have tried several different places to write/host my blog and medium by far
was my favorite. I loved the design, editor and most of all draft/sharing for
in-progress posts. I hope they can find a better business model that still
keeps same spirit.

------
StevePerkins
TL;DR for people who simply _aren 't_ going to turn off their ad-blocker for
businessinsider.com?

------
overcast
That sad puppy face headline photo pretty much sums it up for me.

------
coldtea
> _They were shocked. Their adored boss, billionaire CEO Ev Williams, best
> known as the cofounder of Twitter, seemed to care so deeply for each of
> them._

LOL, as if CEOs (with the exception of some outliers in small businesses) ever
care for their employees at the personal level. As soon as the company is in
danger, it's off they go. And when the company does well, they aren't going to
share the loot that much either.

~~~
dboreham
Jim Barksdale : "I'm not your Daddy and this isn't a family"

~~~
sah2ed
Mind providing a source for that quote?

Both Google and Bing link to your comment as the canonical source for that
quote from Barksdale.

~~~
dboreham
Well, I was there so it came from my memory.

Some googling did drag up this interview, so presumably I did not dream it:
[http://articles.latimes.com/1996-03-17/business/fi-47920_1_n...](http://articles.latimes.com/1996-03-17/business/fi-47920_1_netscape-
navigator)

------
johndoe4589
I like Medium for browsing front end dev articles in the morning.

But I think there is a big UX and design issue that should be questioned : the
"feed".

This concept has been overused and it doesn't serve users. When I read on
Medium, I'm in the mood for reading programming stuff, or design stuff, or
other stories. But I'm rarely in the mood for reading a completely random feed
of all those topics intermingled. That makes no sense to me.

And you can follow "Publications" but it doens't help very much, you still get
a "feed" in the homepage. And the publications don't really work as a magazine
rack.

That imho is the biggest weakness of their design.

How would I solve that? First off stop "feeding" people. I mean just the term
is wrong. Why do we need to be "fed"? The assumption for this design I assume,
is that a feed makes it easy to discover content and for the initial
experience. But why should it remain the central piece of focus everytime you
start the app?

I think it would make more sense to add the concept of magazines. That is why
I think Flipboard works so well (at least for me). The problem with Flipboard
is that it also treats every magazine as a feed, and is designed primarily as
a RSS kind of consumption where old content is to be forgotten while only new
content is relevant. Thus it also doesn't work as a repository of valuable
articles. A lot of things are written that are timeless and both the Flipboard
and Medium approach and insistence on "current day" writing/ stories reduces
the value of these tools.

What I would suggest is to add the concept of magazines at the very least. Let
people create "baskets" of interests, and let them drag and drop tags into
these baskets. Then present those "smart magazines" with tags showing where
there are updates?

\----

As an aside my experience with Medium last month could be summed up in two
words: "feminist rants".

Ever since I started using Medium, I thought.. I already use Flipboard and
Feedly. So let's focus. There are some pretty cool CSS/Javascript articles on
here so I decided to follow exclusively programming and design topics. I would
read Medium in the morning to catch up on front end dev lang.

But.. Medium had another idea. My feed kept getting ridiculous feminist rants
and other political B.S. I don't want to read. No matter how many times I pick
"Show fewer stories like this" I couldn't get rid of them. This happened for
several weeks.

I contacted them because I thought my account was the perfect example of
something wrong with their recommendation algorithm. Why on earth did Medium
keep saying I am interested in feminism when I NEVER recommended any such
articles (they tend to have obnoxious click bait titles and terrible writing)?

I looked through every person that I may have followed or recommended. I
could'nt find anything. The closest to a meaningful connection I could see is
one female journalist who "liked" on of my responsoes. Mind you Medium
considers a simple comment to someone else's story as a "story". As if a
comment had the same value as writing an articile in the first place. But I
digress...

So I blocked a couple people. First off, they don't disappear from the
notifications pane. This is WRONG imho.

Secondly, it didn't change squat.

Eventually I became sick and tired of seeing feminist rants in the middle of
my programming / design feed; so I deleted my account and started anew. Hey at
least Medium got this right : you can delete your account entirely and it was
easy.

So here is my tips for people who still want to use Medium:

\- NEVER EVER follow anybody whom you aren't sure that they share your
interests 100%. \- NEVER EVER recommend any articles unless you reviewed the
tags and all the tags are specific enough to your interests. (Medium loves to
make all kind of tangential connections and also recommend you stuff based on
extremely lose tags like "Journalism" or "Essay"... follow these and soon
enough raging feminists will entertain your feed every day).

Funny enough even with these rules in place. When I created my new account I
still got an influx of feminist/political rants (bad writing) but they were
gone after a few days.

And I realize that I use Medium in a way they probably didn't mean to: I
really focus my feed on an area of interest. But then again they designed this
completely wrong putting things backwards. When I go into a newspaper shop, I
browse the rack for magazeines I'm interested in. I don't go to the owner and
say, "hey you got something from me to read?" And even if I did, he'd probably
look at me weird for a moment, then he'd be like "well, what do you like to
read?"

Presumably this is what the tags system is supposed to do. Many online sites
lets you pick your "interests" whne you creat a new account. But the analogy
stops herE. Because in a newspaper shop, I'd tell the guy "well, videogames,
and uh.. science". And he 'd point me to magazines. He wouldn't print a "feed"
to me of random crap from different sources.

\---

PS: Also please stop writing "stories" in your iOS updates and tell your users
what you changed or fixed, even if it's minor thing. Yeah, we get it you're
all about "stories". Jesus. Stick to medium if you want to entertain people,
and serve your users by describing what yo uactually changed or updated, even
if it has to be the usual "misc performance fixes".

------
chris_wot
I just use gitbook nowadays.

