
Venture capital is going to murder Medium - hit8run
https://m.signalvnoise.com/venture-capital-is-going-to-murder-medium-656cbccf4829
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michaelbuckbee
Discussed yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328549)

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ironchef
"Five years is not enough time to think about how we should make any money in
a way congruent with our founding values? That just doesn’t compute."

Sure it does.

"they sweat the details like nobody else"

It sounds to me like they focused very aggresively on user satisfaction / user
experience based on DHH's quote above. Figuring out how what pricing / service
model looks like, what sales should look like, etc. obviously takes some
amount of effort > 0\. It would appear based on the above that Medium focused
on the one side of the pendulum more than the other side in the balance. That
would've been their undoing regardless of VC money (as without VC money they
would've had to put focus on a revenue model earlier which would've led to a
different experience than the one he had).

This is typically why folks talk about Product Market fit. Both sides of that
_very_ complicated relationship are important.

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snarf21
It also doesn't seem like they tried to fix the real issue. From all accounts,
their platform is easier to create content on but was that really the pain
point?

There are lots of people who enjoy creating content but would like there to be
_some_ ability to have the chance to grow into their full time gig.
Additionally, there is so much content out there that discovery is a real
problem. But they took a direct approach and just put ads on the page but you
need huge scale to get big money. I wonder if people would pay for a Medium
"subscription" if what their site did was recommend three articles each day
that you are likely interested in. (Obviously using some kind of ML to slowly
learn your areas of interest and writers you prefer). The content creators get
a cut based on views and ratings (maybe?), which circles back to better
content. Once you have tons of awesome content, people will always pay.

The above is not fully baked, just thinking aloud....

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mtw
I tried Medium about two years ago and had good viewership, across a dozen
posts. It's a very nice platform to write and broadcast your ideas. Ultimately
though, there is no way that I would pay for Medium. I learnt a long time that
whatever publishing medium you choose, it will most likely fold, after the
buzz dies out. It's much better to host your own publications. I also don't
believe they will get any business from already struggling companies. Anyone
except Facebook/Google is struggling.

However, I do like the Medium's overall design practises, as well as the
social practices. I hope that in the worst-case scenario, the design and
relevant tech will open sourced.

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mgkimsal
> It's much better to host your own publications. I also don't believe they
> will get any business from already struggling companies

I've been mulling over some mix of the two ideas for some time now. I keep
thinking it's been done or will be done soon, but I've not seen it (or... am I
missing something).

Basically, some form of aggregation/curation of individual blogs. The 'planet'
aggregators had an initial vision of this, but they were 'read only'. It would
be far more useful if I could engage with each individual blog from the main
aggregation site. Authors keep control of their own content (including
comments, probably), but are aggregated/federated out to larger networks, but
visitors can engage with a variety of topics without having to go
register/join each site.

Has this been done and I'm just missing something?

I'd probably pay a nominal fee for a service like that, assuming that a
portion made it back to the sites I engaged with (reading or commenting or
sharing or whatever).

If medium was a collection of blog posts from existing blogs, and the comments
were shared between medium and the host blogs, both ways, for example. Anyone
doing that?

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nickrivadeneira
I think that problem is solved by something like Feedly. There's no
integration of comments, but is a somewhat personally curated source of blogs,
regardless of hosting platform.

~~~
mgkimsal
any feed reader is a curated set...

the ability to interact with others in the content from a feed reader (a feed
'client', not just reader, may be what I'm talking about) is what's missing.

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wonko1
This popped up yesterday, I guess we really do have short memories... here's
what I said then:

Feels like we'd only just forgot about Posterous. At least Posthaven is
already there to accept the fallout? Nice to see ten times as much money was
raised this time though. Such a shame though, would be nice if there was a
better way of extracting value from these viable but non-unicorns.

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aibottle
> It didn’t have to be this way. Ev could have RECONSIDERED. He surely had
> enough in the bank from previous exploits. Started slower. Not hired 150
> people before there was a path to profitability, let alone sustainability.
> Maybe you will.

Well the Twitter folks is not known for clever business moves. Seriously
though, how do you need 150 people for that website?!

