I regularly read some great articles on Medium, as a publishing platform the quality is quite decent. But the problem Medium has is content relevancy. I go to the homepage and Medium recommends me articles I have no interest in at all. The NYT are doing quite well from a subscriptions perspective, so people don't have issues with paywalls mostly if the content is good and there is value. But, Medium has prematurely announced a subscription when they have nothing they can really offer.
Medium needs to fix their algorithms so I stop seeing irrelevant Donald Trump opinion pieces that I, as an Australian have no interest in reading. As far as paying for online content goes, Medium is probably the only platform I'd justify paying for written content. I want to see Medium and Ev succeed.
Is there some reason you want to see Ev succeed? He sounds like another egomaniacal founder who doesn't care about his friends (Noah Glass) or employees. And it sounds like he's pretty good at coming up with products people love but pretty bad at getting them to have revenue that beats expenses (Twitter, Medium).
I think Ev is a brilliant mind. For comparison, Steve Jobs is often cited as being brilliant and a visionary, but he was an egomaniac as well. The difference being, Steve Jobs was celebrated as a genius. I don't think Ev is on the same playing field as Jobs, but there are some parallels here.
Twitter started off as a great platform, then once the investors came on board it started going down hill. I think there is hope for Medium, it will take more than Ev to make it a profitable company though.
"Maybe Medium really is just Blogger 2.0, or WordPress, LiveJournal, or any of the countless blogging platforms we’ve long-since forgotten about. It doesn’t matter, though. For Williams, Medium’s challenges are the same as the ones staring other publishers in the face."
Seems like with other publishers, they come, they go. But it's really about quality content, and that seems to float to the newest most trendy thing? Nobody seems to really care what platform the content is published on, as long as it's good.
All the best medium articles I feel like I find through here, rather than medium's suggestions, so really it just does feel like an easily managed wordpress to me.
Medium needs to fix their algorithms so I stop seeing irrelevant Donald Trump opinion pieces that I, as an Australian have no interest in reading. As far as paying for online content goes, Medium is probably the only platform I'd justify paying for written content. I want to see Medium and Ev succeed.