
Medium raises $25 million - mikegreenspan
http://recode.net/2014/01/28/medium-evan-williams-post-twitter-media-startup-raises-25-million-round/?utm_source=appnet
======
state
I guess this is the direct counter-argument to my comment in the thread about
Svtle.

Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over their
content? I find it so strange that these services which are pitched directly
at people who consider themselves to be brilliant also become the archive for
your stuff. It just seems like a conflict of interest when, yes, what exactly
is their game plan?

~~~
lowglow
> Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over
> their content?

You comment here. Isn't that basically the same thing? What are comments if
not for mini-blog posts sometimes.

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minimaxir
Hacker News comments don't require the blood, sweat, and tears involved in
writing a 1,000-word well-edited essay.

Additionally, Hacker News comments aren't used by the owning website for
potential profit. (Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments
anyways)

~~~
bhouston
> Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways

Comments are the price some websites pay to encourage higher levels of
engagement, and the high level of engagement here on HackerNews makes it a
more valuable resource to its readers (more submissions, more voting, and
sometimes informed comments from the community) and thus it has a halo effect
on YCombinator. Thus the comments in the grand scheme of things are surely a
net positive.

Reddit and YouTube are built in part on comment driven engagement even if a
large majority of the comments are poor.

~~~
atmosx
I dislike not being able to leave a comment. Yes, I'm outspoken, strong-
opinionated and I want to express myself. I liked the HN community before
realizing that YCombinator is an incubator, etc. I am/were/came here for the
community.

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mesozoic
Most of the posts on medium are so poorly written or blatantly false I just
avoid the whole domain now. So in my eyes they have a lot of work to do to fix
their branding.

~~~
650REDHAIR
I'm with you on this. In my eyes it's the "Experts Exchange" of our time.

~~~
primitivesuave
At least they made the good decision of avoiding a domain name containing a
hidden sexual innuendo.

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normloman
"Ideally, Williams envisions Medium much like a magazine creative director,
inviting the types of items that may show up in a magazine, from features to
top-ten lists to cartoons to even video."

Good. The internet needs more top 10 lists.

~~~
rtpg
Top 10 lists might be the lowest form of journalism but accepting articles as
top 10 lists allows us to avoid the "fake article that actually is a top 10
list" situation. A nice price to pay.

~~~
normloman
Or you could just use human editors with discretion and reject both types of
articles.

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misiti3780
I think mediums UI is nice, but as far as i can tell, you cant include code
snippets so its almost useless for blogging about programming - until the
change that, I am going to continue to use jekyll.

~~~
goronbjorn
They do support code blocks: [https://medium.com/help-
center/128f049a7ad](https://medium.com/help-center/128f049a7ad) (just search
the page for "Code block")

~~~
nilkn
It's pretty limited (e.g., no syntax highlighting) and if you're not careful
it will do things like change double quotes (U+0022) to curly quotes (e.g.,
U+201C and U+201D).

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choarham
So, you can type text into a box and people can comment on it. And it has a
nice font.

My startup idea is that we sell chairs, but the chairs are nicer than some
other chairs and they say 'chair' on them. Can I get $25 million too?

~~~
untog
_So, you can type text into a box and people can comment on it._

Like Facebook, and Twitter, and all those other sites that are clearly and
obviously different from each other and come on you're trolling aren't you
please tell me you're trolling

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wyck
A closed source, curated and content ceded blog platform, ..is this a sign
that the internet has come full circle..again

~~~
kevando
Pretty sure that happened when Yahoo! paid 990 million for the new Geocities

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speakme
The personnel are impressive, and it's a great service, but what is their game
plan?

~~~
kevinchen
Right now, Medium is little more than a nicer looking Blogger. But they are
vying for the future of online publishing.

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staunch
The cool thing is Ev is rich enough now to pay back the full $25M personally
if he decides to pull another Odeo/Twitter.

...though I imagine most investors will keep their money in play this time :-)

~~~
rabble
We didn't have a choice last time.

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seeingfurther
Why would a billionaire, proven operator and executor raise a round?

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js2
_Which raises the question: Why is Williams taking outside capital at all?

Williams, in an interview earlier this week, cited a few reasons: As Medium
scales, taking money from multiple investors is a signal of long-term thinking
and diversification to the company’s employees; and the more parties that have
a stake in Medium outside of Williams, the more they have a stake in the
company’s success._

~~~
dclara
That's really true. Even if the company has sufficient fund to run by itself,
it still needs to go for VC and IPO in order to attract more users, more
talent and have a secure exit.

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suyash
Are we in a bubble or what.

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winslow
Does medium have any current revenue stream or any plans for revenue?

~~~
look_lookatme
Oh they are definitely going to advertise is some form or another.

~~~
pearjuice
Just like Twitter heh.

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mathattack
Great for them. I'm curious - how much of this is based on the quality of the
service, versus the quality of the founders?

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atmosx
My deficit for being European: How the hell are expecting the investors to
make money out of this?!?!?!

~~~
GuiA
Most likely acquisition.

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af3
If only medium would produce something...other than blog posts...

~~~
dclara
Same type of questions: what's the difference from other blogging sites?
What's the business model? Maybe because of its huge user base? I think all
these questions have already been answered though.

~~~
lmm
Even if medium is never anything more than tumblr with clearer design and
restricted to plain text, that will still be a valuable thing.

~~~
dclara
I like the style and my blog is using the similar style with text only with
RWD (Responsive Web Design) I learned from other people.
[http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ](http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ)

But that's not the only value there. I guess a lot of people like to post
their blogs on Medium which gives a sort professional taste. But I think
blog.com and wordpress.com are also very good sites.

I'm just curious about the evaluation from the investors point of view. A
service website may not value that much because they don't have a real
product. User base may change over night.

