
Renewing Medium’s focus - minimaxir
https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be
======
herplederp
Newly ex-Median here. This was not a huge surprise. On the surface, this is a
change in product strategy. The underlying story is the company positioning
itself so it can survive an adverse environment if it needs to. It's hard to
fault managers for dealing with that potential (and its hard to deny that the
next 2-4 years could be really bad). Hopefully not, but it would be
malpractice not to prepare.

So better to focus resources now than be walking dead in a year or so,
jettison unnecessary products/projects, and hope for the best. It's a great
product, and with time and luck, they'll sort out a good business model, but
like the rest of the publishing world, they're still sorting things out.

Despite being one of those made redundant, I enjoyed being there, and wish
them the best. On that note, you should ask yourself if you are prepared for
winter, because winter is coming.

~~~
ivraatiems
What do you mean by an "adverse environment over the next 2-4 years"? Please
be more explicit.

~~~
herplederp
Local picture: the revenue model for online publishing is still broken, Medium
is in the publishing business.

Big picture: Donald J Trump, and the potential to cause widespread disruption
that benefits nobody. Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money
for startups with hazy revenue models will not be cheap.

In either case, reducing your burn rate by $10M per year is a smart move.

~~~
antisthenes
Really? Blaming Trump for a terrible business model?

No matter how far you are in the SV bubble, even you must admit that was one
hell of logical leap.

> Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money for startups with
> hazy revenue models will not be cheap.

Sounds like a great thing to me.

~~~
orf
> even you must admit that was one hell of logical leap.

Yeah who does this ex-median think he is? It's not like he worked there.

~~~
Noseshine
If he knows how Trump has influence on Medium's business he didn't show it.
I'm more than eager to hear that storyline. I would be interested in something
more concrete than the numerous "the sky is falling" articles based 99% on the
author's personal feelings and fantasies though. That obsession with Trump is
a mania by now, that and "Russian hackers", a self-feeding frenzy.

------
ohstopitu
In my opinion, Medium has a problem - It's not really a product that is
supposed to make a LOT of revenue (for it's size).

In all honesty, it's very easy to technically build & maintain Medium with as
few as 5 engineers. Add a few more people (say 5 - 6 more) and you have a good
business (not a crazy growth startup) that can generate revenue and most
importantly be sustainable.

As for generating revenue: it's very easy to charge people a few $ / m for
stuff I'd consider extra features (premium themes and custom domains).

It's sad those 50 people lost jobs (I feel for them - I had lost my previous
job when a startup decided to downsize), but in all honesty - what do 150 do
at Medium and more importantly, WTF did Medium do with ~123 Million [0]?

[0] -
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium#/entity)

~~~
rco8786
I always find it amusing when people say "I could run XYZ with a 10th of the
engineers, easy!", as if they have any actual insight into the engineering
backends that run these services.

I remember a couple years ago there was a guy claiming he could run Twitter
himself on 4 really big servers.

~~~
nateberkopec
That's because there's a bunch of examples of companies that have deployed
massive services with a dozen or so engineers. Craigslist, Snapchat, Wikipedia
(until recently) to name a few.

~~~
rco8786
Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch, and Snapchat is rumored to
have over 1,000 employees?

There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and
maintained by 5 engineers.

~~~
carlivar
> Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch

You say that like it's a bad thing.

~~~
pcwalton
Yes, I suspect that it is a bad thing. People who like modern UIs greatly
outnumber people who like ones from the '90s.

The most straightforward explanation as to why Craigslist remains king is
simple: network effects.

~~~
alexandercrohde
Mind you that you're writing that point on news.ycombinator.com (another
'90s-esque site).

Maybe people prefer a "newer" web interface when it doesn't have ads, banners,
popups, auto-playing-content, clutter (see yahoo), oversized images, 25
tracking scripts loading, but the lesson seems to be that too simple trumps
too complex. An example that gets it exactly right IMHO is gmail.

The OTHER problem with having a nice UI is then people start to want to
redesign every year, buy new logos, constantly adapt new design and FE trends
(make it flat! make it angular! make it ES6! make it react! now pre-render on
the server!).

~~~
pkamb
The "how it looks" of Craigslist is fine, just like HN. The "how it works" is
abysmal.

------
matt4077
It's disheartening to learn that advertisement apparently isn't even
profitable (enough) for a platform that doesn't even pay for its content.

Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the
internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to
support any professional publications.

There's obviously no shortage of hate for "mainstream media" right now, so
probably many people can't await the demise of that industry. I'm just
wondering which blogger we'll send to cover Ebola in Guinea-Bissau and which
twitterer will file & finance 14 FOIA lawsuits[0]. But maybe democracy works
just as well without people digging into "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court documents".

[0]:
[http://www.charliesavage.com/?page_id=303](http://www.charliesavage.com/?page_id=303)

~~~
hkmurakami
>Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the
internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to
support any professional publications.

Even at the Washington Post (profitable now), what drove growth was their
opinion pieces (which they're doubling down on). And opinion pieces, while
having their own merit, is rarely _journalism_. It makes me sad.

~~~
JimmyAustin
I guess the argument is that journalism is, in many ways, a commodity.
Journalism, when defined as the reporting of precise core facts (X happened in
Y, Z people were hurt), is available all over the internet.

In order to provide value, newspapers need to provide exclusive value-add,
which in many cases includes opinion pieces. Opinion pieces allow experts in
the area to link many different news items together to provide a more holistic
view of the news item.

Anyone can tell me that 5 Coalition soldiers were killed by an IED, but it
takes an opinion piece by an expert in counter insurgency tactics to provide
context about how that might represent a shift in tactics/approach by a group.

~~~
caminante
Even at that, I think the rise of freelancers and devoted hobbyists is
competing away value adds for mass market journalism. News will continue to
get disintermediated.

For news firms seeking survival or sustainable operations, you'll see your
"value add" opinion pieces consume more of the content with less actual news.
This is WaPo's strategy [0].

[0] [http://digiday.com/publishers/washington-post-grew-
digital-s...](http://digiday.com/publishers/washington-post-grew-digital-
subscriptions-145-percent/)

~~~
grzm
_I think the rise of freelancers and devoted hobbyists is competing away value
adds for mass market journalism._

I think there's some truth to this. I think there's also a need for
accreditation or other validation/reputation services, not to serve as a
gatekeeper, but to assist in helping people determine which sources are likely
worthwhile to listen to. If the vetting needs to be done for each person on a
per-author basis, that can be overwhelming, not dissimilar to the paradox of
choice.

In some ways this may end up looking similar to existing publishers, though
with a little less tight-coupling between author and publisher. It's pretty
clear there are large changes underway.

------
6stringmerc
As a pretty committed Medium writer, I've been impressed by their platform and
how it has worked for my purposes. Very similar to SoundCloud. I haven't ever
really figured out how either intended - or will eventually - turn a profit.
I'm quite familiar with the "value gap" argument and the acrimonious
relationship between, ahem, content and tech heavyweights in the US.

> _So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for
> writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for
> people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans
> who want to get smarter about the world every day.

It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like._

Oh, I've got a guess, and it certainly doesn't involve me getting paid more
per view or read than I do via Spotify or any other "Artistic Content as
Commodity" platform. Medium has been a decent trade-off: They don't charge me,
and I don't expect anything but "exposure" in the grand sense. Not surprised
this isn't exactly rolling in dough as a business model, but I'll stick around
to see how they fare.

[https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/media-analytics-prtsc-
beer-d...](https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/media-analytics-prtsc-beer-
december-2016-edf3d2e76ed0#.ejkxri9vi)

~~~
lancewiggs
You are helping them build their business by providing your content for free,
as did contributors to Huffington Post.

How do you feel the balance of compensation is, and how do you feel about your
control - or lack of - of your own content?

~~~
6stringmerc
As with Huffington Post, the hosting platform of Medium also sets an
expectation floor for audiences / readers that the format will likely be to
their preference. Thus the chicken-or-the-egg syndrome somewhat: Do they come
to Medium for my Content, or did they discover my Content because it is on
Medium? I think both avenues are realistic. Equal? I dunno, really I don't,
and I think that's the secret sauce too a "community" of getting people to
latch on and stay in it (e.g. Facebook).

I think the balance of compensation is fine for my purposes. I don't recoup
the $19.99 annual fee via DistroKid that gets me into iTunes, Spotify, etc, so
I'm generally a skewed perspective. In practical terms though - and this I
truly believe is important - I think less than 1% of the Content Creator
Population in any given Commercial Art Enterprise in the United States earns a
Middle-Class Living (Wage + Benefits). Basically I think it's unfair in Modern
Times to think that Musicians and Writers really had a lot of opportunities to
make a good living before technology came around. Of course I'd like that to
change, and maybe Spotify and Medium can play a role in that, but breaking the
grip of RIAA and AP/Reuters isn't exactly an overnight proposition.

~~~
thoughtpalette
Thanks for calling out DistroKid, that seems like a great service. Going to
pass it along to some musical colleagues.

------
franzen
If you check out all of the "sponsored" or "partnership" content on Medium,
like:

[https://theringer.com/](https://theringer.com/)

[https://electricliterature.com/](https://electricliterature.com/)

[https://medium.com/the-economist](https://medium.com/the-economist)

[https://medium.com/@generalelectric](https://medium.com/@generalelectric)

[https://medium.com/@Starbucks](https://medium.com/@Starbucks)

You'll notice the engagement is absolutely _terrible_. Between 10-100 likes,
and even those stats are inflated by (no doubt terrified) Medium employees.
Keep in mind, the rough "like" to "view" ratio is ~1:100, so hardly any of
these posts are even cracking 10,000 views. Those are okay numbers when you're
paying your writer/marketing guy $200 per post. Hardly the foundation for a
company valued last year at $400M.

Of course, Medium could monetize with banner ads like every other site, and it
does have enough traffic to do that (it's the 371th most visited site in the
world.) However, most writers only write on Medium _because_ there aren't any
ads. If Medium suddenly started monetizing on my content "YouTube style" I
would leave them for Wordpress in a second. The Medium community is fine
(they'll drive 100-1000 views per post on my pieces) but that's not enough to
justify graffitying my content with ads.

It seems like there's a major identity crisis going on here. On one hand, a
lot of great pieces are published on Medium. (Perhaps not as many since Medium
de-funded/spun-out their flagship in-house publications, Matter and
Backchannel). But there's also a crazy amount of crap. The top stories on
Medium are almost invariably listicles and trite "How I Xed my Y in Z days".

I get the feeling Medium set out to position itself as a curated Wordpress
(which might justify that gargantuan valuation) but these days it feels pretty
much like an awkward, less popular, and slightly more erudite Buzzfeed.*

*Buzzfeed is not without its own problems. See traffic stats here: [http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com)

~~~
tonystubblebine
> so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 view

I think there's probably a problem in these numbers, but I'm 99% certain
you've misread the tea leaves.

The Ringer page views are through the roof. But those are not coming from
regular Medium users who typically leave reviews. So the problem is, why don't
these visitors engage more, rather than why doesn't The Ringer have any page
views.

IMO, big sites like The Ringer are bets that obscure what's wonderful and
working at Medium. For a blogger like me, posting to Medium is a 10x on page
views. 37Signals posted something similar. All the mid-size blogs that come
over are having a great time.

~~~
franzen
Okay, that's a fair criticism. I don't have inside info on The Ringer's page
views. I have info on another dozen or so publishers though, and the ~1:100
ratio generally sticks.

Since you're a Medium advisor, maybe you can shed some light: how many of The
Ringer's page views are coming because of native Medium readers vs. because
Bill Simmons is linking to articles?

If I'm a deep-pocketed advertiser with little social media engagement (unlike
Simmons), how does posting to Medium benefit me? Why am I not better off
paying Bill Simmons to tweet about my product than pay the Medium middle man?

Relatedly, is it fair to extrapolate Medium's "10x on page views" on your blog
to the average user, who doesn't start off with 20k Twitter followers? (Note:
Medium uses Twitter followers to kickstart your Medium following.)

For the average user who doesn't know how to market their posts, I agree,
Medium is a godsend. There's a small community of committed readers (good for
page views) and the design is great (good for sharing.) But do you really
think that these are game-changing advantages? Do you think that these
advantages will survive once/if Medium starts plastering its posts with banner
ads?

~~~
tonystubblebine
Here are my recent stats. I don't know really that the 1:100 ratio is real at
all: [https://www.quora.com/profile/Tony-
Stubblebine](https://www.quora.com/profile/Tony-Stubblebine)

I do know though that specific to The Ringer that their page views are
completely decoupled from what you can see in engagement. I have no idea where
that's coming from or even what's required for them to be a media success. But
I do know that they are getting heavy traffic.

Re: game changers. I wrote in one of the other threads that my analysis of the
market is that there is has been a non-stop demand for personal publishing
products since 2000: blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Twitter,
Tumblr.

And we're in a moment now where many of those seem institutionally unable to
modernize. This word "game-changer" is so loaded. Is changing the game the
goal? Or just serving a huge market?

From the start, I've seen Medium as at minimum a modern version of an
evergreen class of software. Obviously, they've done that by simplifying out
features that end up not mattering a lot (customizable themes) and making a
beautiful text editor.

On top of that, none of those other platforms ever did anything to boost my
page views. I think that's a real benefit of the platform that goes well
beyond whatever audience you bring with you.

I see my own stats (based on 20k Twitter followers) and the stats of people in
my publication (Better Humans). It really seems like the pairing of a strong
title with strong content is the primary driver of traffic. Publications will
take those articles and then recommends will drive a ton of traffic.

Many of the people who write on BetterHumans are starting with no audience to
speak of. It's certainly a huge ego boost to experience a few thousand page
views for the first time.

------
mi100hael
_> As of today, we are reducing our team by about one third — eliminating 50
jobs, mostly in sales, support, and other business functions. We are also
changing our business model to more directly drive the mission we set out on
originally._

This is an enormous failing on the part of management as well as Silicon
Valley culture in general. These startups hire far too many people far too
early, piss away a bunch of money, and then lay off half their workforce and
"pivot" once they realize their business plan actually sucked balls from the
start.

~~~
beat
Meh. It's a hard balance to strike, between being poised for growth, and
knowing the growth will work. It's expensive and failure-prone, but if you
don't do it that way, you get passed up or hit an upper boundary.

~~~
eropple
You also hurt people in the process, and that's something that tends to fall
out of the calculus.

At the end of the day, humans are pretty much the only thing that matters.

~~~
toennisforst
What would you prefer instead? That they not hire these 50 people at all?

~~~
eropple
I'd prefer that they adopt a sane and reasonable growth strategy that doesn't
depend on pump-and-crash cycles. There's a certain pernicious idea in business
in general and in startups particularly that your worth is in large part how
many people are working for you (I've heard multiple people answer "hey, how
are things going" with "we just hired five people!" and my blood runs cold)
rather than the efficacy with which you are achieving your goals.

(I'm a little less sympathetic in the case of engineers, who are an in-demand
resource and so their opportunity costs are less, but the opportunity cost of
your support people is higher and the recovery from the problems that that
failed explosive growth phase cause is much worse.)

------
adamcharnock
I agree with a lot of the discussion here around what 150 employees are/were
actually doing. I also wonder – as some other commenters have mentioned – what
Facebook/Twitter/Google do with their many thousand employees.

However, the more I reflect on it the less I feel this is isolated to tech.
What on Earth do 55,000[1] employees find to do at Morgen Stanley for example,
or 200,000[2] employees at Ford?

I see two possible options:

1\. This is just a limit of human perception. Companies do so much stuff it is
hard for us to conceptualise.

2\. Some combination of bullshit jobs & making work for ourselves.

I find the former believable simply because there are a hell of a lot of
humans and 90% ish have a job.

The latter quickly leads to me to wonder: do we as a society bias towards job
creation regardless of its function.

I therefore suspect both are the case, at least to some extent.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stanley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stanley)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company)

~~~
ascorbic
It's mostly 1 in your examples. Morgan Stanley and Google do lots of different
things, which requires lots of different people. Ford does lots of labour
intensive stuff with a heavily unionised workforce. Facebook and Twitter do
more than you'd think, but more importantly do it at massive scale. Medium,
however, has one relatively simple website, at a scale nothing like
Facebook/Twitter/Google. I struggle to imagine what they all did.

~~~
k__
I don't know about Twitter.

I don't have the feeling they are moving very fast.

They could probably still do good with 1000 people.

------
niftich
Medium downsizes by 33%, disenchanted by the ad-supported model. Pledges to
pivot to heretofore undefined but different publishing model.

~~~
eva1984
This is a glorified article saying 'no one is buying our ads'

------
disordinary
I hope they know what they're doing, because that post was extremely vague. I
guess downsizing gives them more runway to pivot.

The obvious alternative to advertising is micropayments, either behind a
paywall or on a donation basis - similar to what Brave is trying to do. The
problem is our habits as consumers are so deeply ingrained to expect content
as free it's going to be a huge uphill battle if that's what they're thinking.

~~~
WA
Could also be a huge pile of money that gets distributed to writers based on
words read or something like that. Just like Amazon's _KDP Select Global
Fund_.

Although I guess on Medium, this would result in even more click-baity shallow
articles, which doesn't seem aligned with the mission _to make people smarter
every day_.

------
gooseus
I wrote a response to this medium post, figured I'd copy it here since I'm
unsure of the overlap in forum participants:

I had an idea for a model last week that I think would be worth consideration.
It’s sort of a Humble Bundle x Kickstarter x Patreon model.

I’m envisioning a system that allows consumers to pay what they want for
access to the content they value, but also allows creators to establish a
threshold point where the content would become freely available.

So Ev Williams does a bunch of research and writes an article and says
“Awesome article Ev! I probably put 10 hours into it and if I got $500 in
return for that work I’d be super psyched… but I also want EVERYONE to read my
awesome article cause it’s important…”

I would propose a system by which the article is published with a paywall
indicating that the article is only available to contributors until $500
threshold is reached. After the $500 threshold is reached, the article is
released publicly and those contributors who paid get Patron/Contributor
credits on the article (or some other social reward).

Consumers interested in AI will pay for AI content, those interested in
Marketing will pay for marketing content and any content in any subject good
enough to reach the threshold can be enjoyed by everyone.

This is off the cuff and I’m sure there are issues, but I think this category
of model is worth exploring since it compensates creators for their work,
allows eventual free distribution of information and doesn’t make the platform
or creators beholden to advertisers.

~~~
bdcravens
Wouldn't 99% of content go unread? For those who would get readers, wouldn't
most be willing to wait?

~~~
rokhayakebe
Would it mean 99% of all content is worthless then?

~~~
bdcravens
Not necessarily, just unknown authors who may have a lot of great content, but
would never achieve escape velocity for the world to discover them if there's
a patron paywall in place.

------
WA
Medium set out to solve the impossible. They want to reward writers who have
an impact. But impact is actually hard to measure, maybe even impossible. You
need to have some metric to calculate impact. Likes and views can't have too
much weight in the equation, because they can be gamed. Furthermore, page
views are heavily influenced by Medium's recommendation engine.

I, as a nobody, won't be read. So I need to gather followers. I do so in the
traditional way of commenting, liking, recommending, doing all kinds of
community stuff. But again, this can be gamed. This is not impact, but merely
hours put into the social game.

Ultimately, Medium might introduce something like Amazon's KDP Select Global
Fund that pays money to writers based on _some_ metric, but I doubt that it
will be much better than what've got. Why? Human nature.

The current media landscape is refined to _perfection_ already, in a way.
"Modern" articles push our buttons, we are like junkies waiting for their next
fix of information (I guess every HN reader can relate to this – I certainly
can). That's what we really want. We read what tingles our senses, preselected
by a relatively stupid algorithm and _social proof_.

How on earth would you construct a better algorithm that truly measures
_impact_ on our lives?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Well, my impression from the start is that Medium was much more of a "we want
to try some new things for blogging and see what works" model; the assertions
Ev and company have been making that they're on a noble mission to save the
web from itself are relatively recent. They didn't set out to solve the
impossible; they set out to apply what they learned from Blogger to do
something better.

I think an argument can be made that Ev is _right_ that the advertising model
for web content is broken, but there's no sign that they have any idea how to
fix it. My own posts on Medium perform wildly inconsistently -- views from
highs around 45K to lows around two or three dozen -- and at least for me, the
main differentiator seems to be links from outside Medium. Articles that get
selected for attention by Medium editors also get increased traffic, but I
suspect it's hard to get that attention unless you're already getting
recommendations.

I'm enjoying a lot of things about Medium, although 2017 may be the year I
quietly move _all_ my stuff back onto my own platform again, just cross-
posting certain articles over to Medium.

------
jtth
I'm astonished there were 150 people working at medium.

I'm still astonished there are 100 people worked at medium.

~~~
skc
Yes, I'd really like some insight into why they need _that_ many people.

------
minimaxir
> So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for
> writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for
> people.

There's an incentive alignment issue with these types of models which try to
quantify "value" from a holistic perspective. You could say those Facebook
Pages which steal memes and do likes-as-votes shennanigans "create value" for
people too as they generate tons of Likes and EdgeRank exposure.

Medium was always a hub for clickbait thought pieces, but a revenue model like
the ones implied would only make it _worse_.

------
nickjj
I'm not sold on using Medium, or definitely not exclusively.

Why would a content creator publish content on the Medium platform when you
can't even get the e-mail addresses of your subscribers unless THEY pay you
for a membership (that's what I got from their membership FAQ).

In other words, Medium expects content providers to produce top content in
order to grow the Medium platform while the content provider has no way to
realistically obtain a following that's not directly tied into Medium.

That means when Medium goes down, you lose not only all of your posts but your
entire following as a content producer.

~~~
forrestthewoods
I split the difference and setup a custom domain for my Medium blog. I own the
content URLs. If Medium dies then I'll pick a new blog format and new web
host. It won't be the first time and it won't be the last I'll have to make
such a change.

~~~
nickjj
Yeah but if you have a bunch of followers on Medium, all of them will no
longer receive updates when you post new content.

Sure, some percentage of them will know your domain name and check manually
but you're going to lose a huge amount of readers.

My concern isn't so much with Medium dying, it's spending 3 years building a
brand around yourself and eventually figuring out how to monetizing your
audience but now you can't because you have "Medium followers" instead of your
own subscriber list.

------
anigbrowl
I don't have any strong opinion about Medium, but generally when a firm lets
1/3 of its workforce go it's a Big Problem. This is hot news insofar as it
tells us something about the future of the media market, but bigger point to
me is that 50 jobs is such a tiny number. Of course it sucks for those let go,
but 50 new unemployed people won't dramatically reshape the SF tech landscape
and Medium is a well-known firm, so most of those folk will likely land on
their feet.

The reason I think it's news is that it's a glaring example of how network
effects leverage employee productivity so drastically. The tech industry is
always looking for more people, but it's simply never going to employ the same
huge numbers of people that other sectors like manufacturing have. google only
has ~60k employees, which is only about 1/5 as many as IBM. Jobs are a form of
political currency, and while it may be a lot harder to fill 50 tech jobs than
5000 warehouse jobs people often choose quantity over quality. I would expect
the tech sector to carry much less weight under the new administration and
that the next 2 years will be characterized by vicious competition and
consolidation.

------
eva1984
My biggest issue about Medium so far, is the content. Too much opinion, not
that enough investigation, like junk food dressed as fine dining with clucky
javascript.

~~~
ghaff
So you object to blogging in general. Which is what Medium is.

~~~
eva1984
Github pages are good, if that could be classified as blogging, I am a big
fan!

------
tlogan
I'm very very surprised that Medium has issues and they needed to cut 50
employees. And sad. I was thinking they were doing quite well.

Now, I'm concern that there are other startups which have similar problems
like Medium even if they are considered as success stories. So I'm not even
sure which companies I should use as example of "this is how to run the
startup".

What you think about following companies?

\- Slack: maybe it is just a temporary hype?

\- Uber & Lyft: maybe rides should be 100% more expensive?

\- AirBnB: a lot of money is spent on fighting regulations - but elections are
every 4 years and regulators will change...

\- Dropbox: maybe it is the end of PC <-> cloud sync?

\- Github: maybe it is just hype because they are have free option? Maybe
large companies are not ready to source dev to github?

\- Stripe: Maybe they have high valuation just because a lot of small startups
are using them - but as soon as startups grow they move to cheaper systems?

~~~
CN7R
Slack: used it at a hackathon and found it better than Facebook or Skype or
whatever groups use to organize; happy that the club I joined recently as an
officer is using it for communication

Uber & Lyft: haven't used it personally because public transportation is
cheaper and I can wait, even though they were giving out free credit on my
campus; I think carsharing is here to stay, especially if selfdriving cars
become mainstream.

AirBnB: surprisingly cheap, found a $200 a night place in downtown LA for 6
people; I enjoy the concept of people sharing their homes and introducing
tourists to local culture; however, some regulation is needed to protect both
homeowners (from issues like squatting), customers, and renters -- no home
should be used for the sole intent of renting to AirBnB and acting as a hotel.

Dropbox: I only use Google Drice so I can't say.

GitHub: hasn't this company been around long enough so that it isn't just hype
-- anyhow they should find a way to stop burning so much money.

Stripe: I've heard their API is easier to use than competitors, and it seems
they launched Atlas this year to diversify themselves from process payments to
include business incorporation.

~~~
krakensden
Github used to be a no-vc company, then they took a bunch of money and grew
really fast. I do not know if they are profitable again, but this two part
history is why people worry.

------
abalone
_> We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their
ability to enlighten and inform_

So they are going to start charging for reader access[1] but they don't yet
know how. Is there any other interpretation?

I am sad they did not explore a _restrained, regulated_ advertising model. As
much of a dirty word it is, it's not in practice as disliked as "paywall".
Daring Fireball does good ads. Even Google (at least in its earlier days) had
restrained approach to text-only, short, clearly separated ads that people
were ok with.

[1] Note: as I read it the quote specifically precludes a paywall-free
approach such as charging writers for premium features a la other hosting
platforms (sans paywall, at least). They want writers to receive compensation
and they don't want ads.

------
oliebol
People who say Medium is "just a blogging platform" obviously haven't written
many blog posts. Writing a post is easy. The interface to do that is easy.
_Distribution_ is hard - that's the bit Medium solves in a revolutionary way:
getting people to read your stuff.

~~~
Huhty
What about when they were brand new and didn't have the distribution at the
start?

~~~
ckdarby
They had built a free platform that was dead simple to use and it grew from
that :).

------
cocktailpeanuts
Is this just an extremely well written PR piece to handle layoffs?

Or are they actually making some concrete changes to their focus?

I was genuinely curious to hear how they were going to switch their focus, and
agreed with most of what he was saying throughout the article, but after
having finished the article, I came away with no new information. It made me
feel like it was the former--an extremely well written PR piece to cover for
the layoffs.

Am I missing something?

------
dchuk
I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative.
It's just Blogger 2.0, in a prettier outfit. It's just a whole bunch of
networked blogs, started by a really popular Silicon Valley dude.

And now they've realized that ads slapped onto content isn't sustainable. Gee
whiz, welcome to the wonderful world of content publishing, that all other
newspapers and magazines have been made painfully aware of in recent times.

It sucks that a bunch of people lost their jobs today, but really, to think
that Medium was doing literally one single thing in an innovative way was just
plain naive.

~~~
prezjordan
> I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or
> innovative. It's just Blogger 2.0, in a prettier outfit.

Agreed. I feel the same way about Dropbox. You can already build such a system
yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with
curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

~~~
nawitus
Your analogy is flawed. There were and are plenty of other "create a blog with
a few clicks that you don't have to host" services.

~~~
gabrielizaias
Woosh! He's making a satire comment about when Dropbox was first introduced to
HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

~~~
detaro
thus implying that the parent post made the same mistake when judging Medium,
which nawitus (IMHO rightfully) thinks is a flawed comparison. No "Whoosh".

~~~
gabrielizaias
Fair enough.

------
moomin
Ads are a serious problem, and they're failing. However, the standard
alternative (people paying directly) has serious problems of its own.
Basically people pay for what they want to hear. Woodward and Bernstein
wouldn't have survived that model.

------
kevinwang
I hope that trying a non-ad based model will be successful for them. It would
be a huge breakthrough if it happens.

~~~
minimaxir
Switching away from ads from a _moral_ standpoint as presented in the article
is a harder sell when the content publishing industry _as a whole_ is having
issues making money off of it.

~~~
barkingcat
Ad driven media has been crumbling for decades. It's good that Medium is
seeing the light.

Even a startup gets blinded by the fake money that ads promise. I would hope
that this move starts something in the media industry to stop thinking about
ads as a revenue source.

------
rayalez
As a creator of a publication that got invited to join the beta test of their
new monetization strategy, I am very happy about their decision to pivot away
from ads.

I was very disappointed when they have introduced the ads, it never made sense
to me, it flies in the face of their main value prop - clean, elegant,
beautiful, distraction-free blogging platform.

On the other hand, they are in a great position to create a content
monetization system, where people are paying for the content they enjoy. So
far, most of such systems have failed, but I think that Medium is one of the
few companies that can actually make it work. I'm really looking forward to
what they will do with this during the next few months.

------
mtw
Interestingly, all products tied to Twitter are struggling (twitter, medium,
vine, periscoope etc.)

And all products tied to Facebook are thriving (fb, instagram, whatsapp,
messenger)i

------
vonnik
I don't think Medium understood the online media economy when it began, and I
don't think they understand it now. With the advent of the Internet, content
creators like newspapers and television networks saw the barriers to
competition slip away. They were confronted simultaneously with burgeoning
supply (which pushes prices for that supply down the curve) as well as more
rigorous methods to track how people respond to advertising. One reason why
online ads cost less than those in the print edition of newspapers is because
they can be tracked, and the results show that people don't respond that much
to them. The argument for pricing print ads higher is that print editions have
actual subscribers, and therefore disposable income. That subscription model
was the basis of a golden age of news for decades, because publishers could be
assured of their income, and disengage their reporters from the battle for
clicks. They were free to pursue the most newsworthy news. It was a kind of
ivory tower. Now that tower is crumbling, faster every year, even if Trump's
election caused an uptick in subscriptions in the digital editions of some
newspapers. Online subscribers will always be a tiny minority of all readers
(I subscribe to some publications, but I understand why many don't), because
of the river of free content. In an age of disintermediation, content has gone
in the opposite direction, handing more and more money over to middlemen like
the ad networks and search engines and social networks, while content creators
get less and less of every dollar. They are, in a sense, like farmers, who
raise our food from the earth but receive very little compared to the
distributors. Laying off 50 people and changing one's business model won't
change that dynamic one bit.

------
ccostes
I applaud Medium for renewing their focus on achieving what seems to be the
holy grail for virtually all content producers, but especially writers:
getting people to pay directly for content. Netflix and the like seem to have
it figured out for video, but somehow it is a much harder nut to crack for
text.

I agree that it would be better, both for producers and consumers, to find a
different model, so I hope they can figure it out!

------
coffeemug
_> However, in building out this model, we realized we didn’t yet have the
right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content._

You can't make people buy something they don't want.

------
coldtea
> _So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for
> writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for
> people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans
> who want to get smarter about the world every day. It is too soon to say
> exactly what this will look like._

Could this be any more vague and Silicon Valley baloney-ish?

------
ergothus
> So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for
> writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for
> people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans
> who want to get smarter about the world every day. > It is too soon to say
> exactly what this will look like.

I like the general message - acknowledging that the ad model is broken, not
being a jerk to the (many) people they are laying off. I am, however,
uninspired that nothing was actually said about how or what their new model
will be. I can see NOT putting that in the "we just laid off a bunch of
people" message, but that's when you mention that you'll be going into more
detail next week, or at such-and-such conference, or ANYTHING to indicate this
isn't a sign that the company is doomed and this is just the first step.

------
barkingcat
Yes! This is what I was looking for from Medium when I heard of their ad
driven plans:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13089574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13089574)

Ad driven content basically is a sham. It's a way to let companies do whatever
they want with people's minds.

------
Aardwolf
Semi on topic: how does this "top highlight" work? I select sentences and
paragraphs while reading as a marker - but it's unrelated to the content, it's
to track where I am. Do other people only select text they find important or
so?

~~~
avian
This post explains it. It's related to Medium's "Highlight" feature, not the
ordinary text selection:

[https://blog.medium.com/introducing-
highlights-a4df69e8ed43](https://blog.medium.com/introducing-
highlights-a4df69e8ed43)

------
forgotAgain
Maybe it's not focus but quality of content.

When I see that a story is from medium I don't bother with it. History has
taught me that once in a while something there might be of value but mostly
it's very light reading and not worth the time to explore.

~~~
coldtea
Plus a whole lot of "first world's problems" and "white person's activism".

------
lowglow
My hunch is they're going to go to a subscription/patreon model.

------
jfornear
IMO, Medium (like Twitter/Blogger) is about self-expression, not publishing.
Medium should optimize more for fostering self-expression and community
discussion and decouple from Twitter.

Perceived consumer demand to fix publishing is overstated and solves the wrong
nonproblem. Consumers arguably like fake news and click-bait, deriving self-
reinforcement and entertainment value.

I wonder if hiring content marketers to write in verticals with high paying
affiliate programs could get them profitable without compromising their social
mission.

------
Touche
tldr; they aren't making enough money and don't have an idea on how to change
that. They are laying people off who worked on the old failed model and are
winding down to maintenance mode until when/if they can figure out a new model
that no one else has been able to figure out.

------
falloutx
> We decided we needed to take a different — and bolder — approach to this
> problem.

I don't know what model they can come up with except the Ad-revenue model from
per post views. This is not a tech issue, but an issue with the business of
Internet.

Since they have got a lot of good quality publishers, they may go for a
subscription model, but then it would not seem very open to new
publishers/readers. They may go for a per-blog subscription model for some
high-quality publishers like The Economist, Backchannel etc.

Another thing about Medium that gets me boiling is their news feed, its always
populated by very popular bloggers and I have to literally scroll a mile to
get any post from a new or a small blogger with less than 10K followers on
twitter. So it becomes about Popularity rather than Quality(Starbucks articles
about Christmas gifts is not as good as my CS Professor's ramblings). So to
get those posts I would have to unfollow other popular bloggers. There is
nothing like Facebook's "See it First" approach. Only reason I use Facebook
these days is for its "See it First Feature" which lets me control my news
feed really well.

This really looks like failing CEO's post from here. But they have got so much
content from good posters like Addy Osmani, Kevin Rose etc, that it would be
hard to see it go. I don't know why many posters on Medium gave up their own
managed blogs. I know it makes posts look pretty, but so does Wordpress (which
even gives a lot of customization options).

------
johndoe4589
I love to read on Medium but it nly works for me when I NEVER recommend, reply
or even read anything that's not outside my focused interest, which is
programming topics.

Their algorithm is bad , way too sensible. I read a single opiniated post
about politics or what have you and the next day my mostly Javascript / Front
End feed is flooded with angry women talking about feminism, or people talking
about Trump, or that idiot "SF Ali" writing pointless drivel.

They really need to add a way to make magazines of sorts, to be able to have
different feeds. The notion of mixing together all kind of interests doesn't
make sense. WHen I want to read about web development, I don't want to read
about Trump. And vice versa.

I think the design of Medium gave it a certain "chic" but I quickly began to
realize it's just another blogging platform and there are a LOT of badly
written articles on there.

I wish there was something like Medium focused on creating ediucative content,
where banter and personal opinions are frowned upon. So I can go to a feed,
and just LEARN things. I don't know if it's even possible to do that though.

------
neovive
It would be interesting to see if Medium pivots into a model similar to
Spotify or similar streaming music services that charge a subscription and
work out some sort of revenue split with writers/publications. However, they
would still need ads to supplement free users. Should be interesting...

------
andygambles
Some people who publish on Medium (me included) have a commercial arm which is
trying to gain recognition from publishing.

Better known examples would be 37Signals and Buffer.

Increasing sales via the commercial arm is the aim and so being rewarded for
publishing is not completely necessary. In fact I would consider paying for
more premium features. Such as ability to restrict read next to particular
publications or even pay for greater reach in other publishers "read next"
areas which could then compensate them.

I also use Medium to publish personally with no real need for financial
reward. I use Medium because it is easy and I don't get distracted playing
with navigation or sidebar or thinking "I could stick Adsense on this and earn
$2.00 a month".

------
jv22222
I hope they try micropayments for content. Paying authors 1 cent per read,
taken from the readers account, for example.

I've been waiting for someone to do a really good job of that, since the good
'ol days of Gopher.

These guys have a big enough audience to make a genuine attempt at it.

------
jimbokun
That was a very meandering, unfocused article about renewing focus. Granted,
the important news about cutting 50 jobs is in the first paragraph, but the
rest just seems like an attempt to distract from that fact without saying
anything substantive.

------
dzink
They may try a central Medium subscription setup that trickles funds to
authors based on some criteria, or maybe medium as a subscription manager for
authors. Google played with this approach. Does anyone know if they've had
success?

------
kevinbluer
Does anyone have any insight into what happened to Svbtle (svbtle.com)? In its
heyday it seemed to have a ton of momentum / buzz, albeit on a smaller scale
than Medium does today.

~~~
Huhty
Still around.

------
kumarski
The tldr story seems to be: Be a better version of Patreon somehow.

------
scotchio
Calling it now.

Medium.com pivots to become marketplace where you can either publish for free
on their platform or put your writing in an auction for other publications to
buy it.

Journalist/writers/whatever all write in a single location and get published
to multiple publications. The new model.

===

Shameless plug: Consider writing a guest post on scotch.io. Great exposure,
help others, and get paid [https://scotch.io/write-for-
us](https://scotch.io/write-for-us)

~~~
CN7R
What about the twitch model? Writers rely on donations and subscriptions.

------
RivieraKid
Wait, they had 150 employees? Wow...

------
raiyu
Unfortunately this is a bit of a flawed blog post on Medium's behalf. The
facts are that 50 people were fired due to burn rate and lack of revenue.

The second fact is that "NO" fact is given to how this will be rectified in
the future.

The third issue is an opinion. That people need to be paid for the content
they produce. This isn't true. There are plenty of people that are happy to
contribute purely for the common good or for fame. Just look at Open Source
and Linux. It's obvious that Linus is no where near compensated for the
imprint that his work has had on technology, yet he did it and continues to do
it anyway.

Lastly, if you do provide a platform people can monetize their following, just
like Instagram and Snapchat celebrities can monetize their following on their
own with Instagram or Snapchat providing them a direct tool for that.

No blogging platform outside of Wordpress has succeeded to monetize and self-
sustain and it is the exception that proves the rule.

Basically that the content generated on blogs is too long form with a disjoint
following and not enough focus on entertainment which is the primary driver of
ad revenue to survive.

It's the same issue that is facing the news today, they either pander to the
lowest common denominator or they aren't compensated enough to sustain
themselves. That or they just have too much overhead.

Overall the reality is that many people lost their jobs and the response is
just a bit of fluff, when the reality is we screwed up our business model and
had to make cuts would have been much more honest.

Instead they are trying to revolutionize something? It just sounds empty.

~~~
smitherfield
Full agreement. Minor quibble:

 _> Just look at Open Source and Linux. It's obvious that Linus is no where
near compensated for the imprint that his work has had on technology, yet he
did it and continues to do it anyway._

I've read that Linus has a personal fortune of at least $40 million. (He
presumably commands an hourly consulting rate in the high five or even six
figures).

So yeah, he's no Gates/Jobs, but he's doing pretty well for himself. And Linux
would never have been viable as a commercial product. (It would just be some
Finnish dude's buggy/incomplete Solaris clone).

IMO a better example in tech of a founder making a financial sacrifice for the
common good is Jimmy Wales. If Wikipedia had been a for-profit/ad-supported
site, he'd be a billionaire now.

~~~
raiyu
$40MM is definitely nothing to scoff at but if you consider the overall
enterprise value of linux out there in the wild, then it's definitely less
than even 1% of the value that was created.

So on absolute basis compared to a regular salary it's great, but relatively
to the value created, it's no where near the value that he brought to the
world.

~~~
smitherfield
But no value would've been created if Linux hadn't been open-source.

------
nrjdhsbsid
TLDR:

Not meeting profitability targets.

Starting to run out of money.

Selling ads isn't making enough.

Fired a bunch of people.

VC's want us to get back to hyper growth, whatever that means.

Hoping for the best.

------
hiby007
“The current system causes increasing amounts of misinformation…and pressure
to put out more content more cheaply — depth, originality, or quality be
damned. It’s unsustainable and unsatisfying for producers and consumers
alike...We need a new model.”

This statement sums up today's social media state.

------
sakabaro
> We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their
> ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few
> seconds of attention.

Does that mean they are going to start paying people blogging? "Rewards" is a
bit unclear.

------
__ddd__
To those speculating as to the new monitization model: NLP. Improvements in
NLP will open new opportunities for data mining behavioral trends. A company
like Medium is very well positioned to benefit from this coming trend.

------
dilemma
Medium's customer isn't readers nor advertisers. It's publishers - they're a
B2B business and should syndicate content to publications around the world.

------
hownottowrite
"blog.medium.com" \- Why does Medium have a blog?

------
sfilargi
It would be interesting to know what Medium's main expense is? Is it the
people? The infra?

Also would be very curious to know how much do they earn for advertising.

~~~
pcsanwald
people's salaries is by far the biggest expense for most software startups.

------
samnwa
Here's a medium alternative built by one guy: www.allthink.com.

------
johnalamos
Medium.com and their propaganda can all go to hell.

This site was doomed from the moment they started taking money from
politicians.

