I think it's a pretty large strategic disadvantage for a news organization to be headquartered in the little bubble that is San Francisco. Goofballs in SF will read that shit but few others will.
Particularly that "design lessons learned from cats" piece haha! Can't see a newsroom anywhere else in the world being impressed by that ...
BuzzFeed makes its money from native advertising, and it pays for content. In many ways, BuzzFeed is quite a traditional media organization.
Medium doesn't pay for content (at the moment) and doesn't do advertising. While people will happily click on garbage content if it's free, I don't see anyone paying for a "Membership" so they can get a stream of cat design stories and low-effort listicles.
all in all it's weird that medium intend to monetize the viewers instead of the publishers. well many newspapers do that but then readers have back news articles, not blogs and opinion pieces.
Particularly that "design lessons learned from cats" piece haha! Can't see a newsroom anywhere else in the world being impressed by that ...