
Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast - phodo
http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-evan-williams-to-publishers-your-website-is-toast/
======
WA
_Q: How am I going to make money on Medium?_

 _A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do
turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising._

So what's the benefit of Medium over the website of my newspaper, where the
newspaper has 100% control of the appearance, content, advertisers, additional
revenue streams and so on?

Furthermore: I don't read that many magazines or newspapers. But when I do, I
make the conscious decision to read a specific magazine or newspaper, because
they have a certain opinion on things I'd like to know about. Medium blends
all of this in some uni-branded way and at the end of the day, people don't
care about the publisher/brand anymore.

The last time you bought something on eBay or Aamzon Marketplace, do you know
the actual shop's name within the marketplace? Probably not. This is not
desirable for publishers and thus, I don't believe that Medium will be the
future. It's merely an experiment for publishers to play with, to get more
traffic to their own websites (frequently you see the last paragraph stating
"first appeared on wired.com" or whatever).

 _Creating content on Medium is easier than doing your own website. So is
getting readers._

Once the platform is even more crowded, the readers won't come themselves. You
need to actively market your content and then the question is: Why would you
market Medium's platform instead of your own?

~~~
cwyers
> We haven’t solved that problem quite yet.

So, Williams starts off at Blogger, which hasn't solved the problem of making
money for content creators yet, really. To be fair to it, nor has Tumblr or
Wordpress. Then he moves to Odeo, a pdocasting company, which fails to solve
the monetization problem for podcast creators so hard that it pivots into
enterprise video library SaaS solutions. Then he moves to Twitter, which isn't
even trying to solve the problem of how to compensate content creators and is
frankly not looking so good in terms of making enough money to pay itself. And
now Williams is at Medium, where they haven't solved that problem QUITE YET.

Quite yet.

God help me, some days I feel like I'm just staring out into a world gone mad.

~~~
smacktoward
All of those worked out how to make money for Evan Williams quite well,
though, so there's that.

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joelrunyon
I would like to know he who's defining as a publisher.

I think there's a large market of indie publishers who will continue to do
well of their site & using things like medium.com as an outlet or satelite
outreach. I think it's the newspapers that have bigger problems.

Also, it's a pet peeve of mine when they proclaim something is dead and then
when pushed for details on how their service is going to solve it - they say
"oh, don't worry, trust us."

For example, this exchange:

> Battelle: How am I going to make money on Medium?

> Williams: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. We will.
> We’re not going to invent some new way to make money from publishing. Will
> do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable
> advertising. You can do branded/sponsored content on Medium, but there are
> no tools yet. We will have them, though.

Okay, so there's no way to make money off of Medium right now - got it.

Then, he immediately goes on to say:

> If you’re starting something today, within a year, you’ll make more money on
> Medium than you would publishing on your own.

Really? After you _just_ told me that you can't make money on medium? I get
that you need to paint the picture of the future where your product solves
every little problem, but that seemed a little over the top.

And yes, I get it. Williams is much more successful than me and has done a lot
more exits, but from his work, it seems like he's very good at building
platforms, and infrastructure, but the monetization methods (for the users),
isn't really there.

------
Bjorkbat
Medium is pretty cool, I've actually intentionally visited a few times just to
check it some stories on their front page.

Still, there's far too much noise in a platform that hosts so much published
content. Of course, I could "follow" a group's collected writings, but it just
isn't the same as reading from a publisher's actual, custom-branded, web
presence.

I mean, take Rock Paper Shotgun
([http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/)). For
those who don't know, they're an online news blog covering games with a
special balance between the mainstream and the indie and a certain taste that
I can't quite put my finger on.

Medium is an awful, awful fit for these guys. It just doesn't have the right
style to fit their needs.

And he did go on to mention that there will be other platforms, naturally, but
how many? How many will it take to satisfy the wild originality of the
collective internet?

But whatever. Unfortunately an easy tactic for a startup to gain publicity is
for their CEO to say something mildly controversial. Not something smart per-
say, just controversial.

------
ececconi
I think the problem with medium is that it really markets to the self-
congratulatory generation. I've read some really good articles on it, but so
much of it is a product of a generation who expected the world and were upset
when their expectations weren't met.

~~~
jqm
While occasionally happening on a good article, to be fair, there is a lot of
junk on Medium. So much so that I often choose to skip Medium articles posted
on hacker news because my experience is they are very often quickly written
shallow junk.

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mswen
I recently started my own site
[http://computationalimagination.com](http://computationalimagination.com) for
branded writing and interviews. I absolutely wouldn't consider publishing on
medium. I just don't see any benefit to giving up control and branding. Any
consistent audience that I build is mine with clear branding not: "Oh what was
that good article I read on Medium the other day? The author, hmm Mike
something or other?"

As a reader I never start at Medium - the only way I ever read something there
is through references from HN or reddit

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pmontra
The only difference I see between Medium and any newspaper site is the number
of editors. They say that 300,000 people published on Medium, a newspaper has
a much smaller number of writers. I know that such a scale could change many
things but I get to Medium by a search on Google, links on HN,FB and similar
services, exactly the same way I get to a random newspaper article or blog
page. Content has been unbundled and Medium is not special in that regard. Am
I missing something?

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aeden
Ironic that the interview is on Forbes' website. You know, the one that is
toast.

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mark_l_watson
As a general philosophy, I like fine grained production of content. That is,
lots of small independent developers, publishers, writers, etc.

For somethings, like giving Google specific permissions to make my life
easier, I am willing to go with huge companies when I want things like Google
Now to work. It is worth the privacy hit (sometimes) to have voice interfaces
to my calendar, what music I want to listen to, generating quick notes,
warnings of air flight delays, etc.

But, for content, I like to go to the sources (like democracynow.org) not the
aggregators. While I enjoy reading some content on Medium, I can't help but
think the writers are better off having their own domain and work long term to
develop their personal brand. I think that social media like Facebook, Google
Plus, and Twitter have value for publishing references to your work that is on
your site, on your domain. I think of social media as micro-blogging: stuff
that is short and doesn't derserve a full length article on your own site.
Social media is also great for pointing people to good writing on people's
sites.

So, I would say go with huge companies (Apple for Siri, Google for Google Now,
Microsoft for Cortana) for specific services that have value. For everything
else, support small producers.

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midgetjones
I'm guessing the author meant 'cofounder' and not 'confounder'. Although that
might be factually correct as well.

------
beatpanda
Does anyone remember when we were talking about futures in tech that weren't
dystopian nightmares?

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hownottowrite
Two Words: Editorial Oversight

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umziehennachbar
Let the interviewee talk freely and make himself sound messianic and stupid

