I'm guessing I read several Medium articles a month. Some of them are really well produced - Transit's engineering post on beautifying their maps, Remix's post about public transportation planning and ILP, and Karpathy's post on backprop come to mind. So I hope Medium sticks around because I get a lot of value out of them. Would I pay for this value? I think I actually would, but maybe only for stories I finish and think are good. For example I would pay a lot for the stories above but I would almost rather Medium pay me for posts which turn out to be thinly veiled marketing that I stop reading halfway through (I realize Transit's and Remix's posts could be construed as such but hey, the technical content was deep). I suppose a flat fee is better for the business but I could be more convinced to plunk down the credit card at the beginning if I was charged based on usage, like time spent reading on the site.
Also, let me just take a moment to once again rage against Business Insider for writing a pretty bad article. The whole thing seemed purposefully antagonistic and full of sarcastic language. Maybe it's because BI is the exact type of operation Medium is trying to kill, but I think those MAU numbers actually warrant some optimism! To be fair, Medium probably should have provided some people to counterbalance all those angry publishers...
Have you heard of https://blendle.com/ ? They brand themselves as 'Spotify for journalism', with a pay-per-article approach, with an instant refund if you don't like the article. I only started using them a couple of days ago, so I don't have any further useful comment, but it seems like a promising approach.
Actually, the substance of the article wasn't that bad, but after looking again at the browser title, I realized the title didn't square with the article at all, as usual.
Also, I think I would pay for the site, definitely, as long as it still somewhat pays publishers who contribute freely to the site in some cases.
I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX:
- Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades.
- I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts, but I found them interspersed with his comments on other posts, posts he recommended, random snippets of text in other posts he highlighted. Again, every other blog gets this right — go to the top-level page of the blog, and you get a list of posts in that blog.
- Commenting is bad. To sign in to Medium with a Medium account, it emails me a link to sign in. For every single comment I post. I don't want so many emails. Ideally, they should just use Disqus, so I don't have yet another account.
- In any case, after logging in, the box where I should type a comment wasn't clickable.
- When I opened a second Medium post just a few minutes later, I was again signed out, so couldn't comment.
- There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. Scrolling in a smaller screen area is irritating.
- Comments and posts are mixed up. I'm reading the comment on a post, and it says there are two responses, so I click that, and I'm suddenly taken away from the comments I'm reading. I never know on Medium whether a click will yank me away from what I was reading.
As you can see, Medium breaks a lot of things that were working with every other blog for many years. Please, if you want to innovate, make sure you don't already break what is the norm. That would be like making an "innovative" car that doesn't have seatbelts.
If this is considered "idealistic", I don't mind them failing.
> There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area.
That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly) survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen) persistent header...
>> I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts
Blogger does this exceptionally well, or at least used to in its earlier default templates.
It allows monthly archives to be browsed like a tree, this does not require the page to reload and there is no waiting involved. In WordPress blogs if I click on an archive month, it will load a new page with excerpts of the posts. Without giving me a list of post titles I cannot easily decide what to read. As opposed to Medium, in many WordPress blogs, I can at least use URLs (e.g.: /2012/) to see all the posts from particular year or month, but they are paginated excerpts needing multiple clicks if there are more than a couple of posts.
Blogger had this for a long time and I don't see other templates (static sites[1], WordPress) incorporating this useful feature; this is the only feature that I, as a reader, miss in other blog platforms. Medium is the worst for this type of scan-ability. It focus overtly on prettiness[2] and leaves many usability aspects unaddressed. Presentation ugliness I can deal with Readability, Clearly[3] and similar extensions; usable archive browsing needs to be done well at the server side.
>>> so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading.
I think you should go one by one. They have their own SPA logic, so when you click new article, only the content will be loaded, other parts will stay same.
Personally, I respect Ev more for his decision to put on the brakes, even when Medium seemed to be a financial success. We already have enough blogging platforms. We really don't need yet another one.
Ev Williams' mission to change the way journalism is funded and operated though, that's a truly noble ideal. Yes, it's likely too ambitious to succeed. Yes, it's a moonshot. But it's exactly the kind of moonshot that Silicon Valley needs to be taking. It's exactly the kind of moonshot that the world could really benefit from. I applaud him for his decision to put his unicorn at risk, in order to build something that could truly change the world.
He could have done that with a lot more tact - informing publishers and employees. He's non-confrontational - ok. Hire someone that isn't. Moonshots carry a risk and it's not all his risk. It's the investors, the users, the employees as well.
This doesn't surprise me, based mostly on the occasional conversations I've had with Medium employees (all of whom raved about their jobs, by the way).
Medium seems to fall into a growing group of companies that are more interested in innovating on their management/internal politics than actually creating innovative products. (Buffer, which also had layoffs and management departures, is another example.) They're very invested in trying new management frameworks like holacracy and signaling a commitment to things like transparency or diversity. This is all well and good (plenty of very successful companies have innovated on internal structures as well).
The problem is when it becomes the entire emphasis of the company. If you look at what people's priorities are, it seems like they're more interested in the company than the product. You can't have two P0s and until you have a successful and profitable product, that needs to be your P0. [0]
[0] Unless you can fund things indefinitely off your personal brand and net worth.
I think the problem with journalism is that it was never the actual business. What it was, were supporting and adding sophistication to the news industry, but it was never actually central to the business. But the value of news was that it didnt used to be widely available. That was actually what people paid for. The news, not the journalism. And so what we see are all these people in the news industry trying to improve their business by improving journalism.
Don't forget classified ads either. Historically the rule of thumb is that subscriptions and newsstand sales would more-or-less cover the cost of ink and paper. Ads (and especially classified ads, which were an enormous money spinner) paid for the actual journalism.
The moment the internet gutted ad revenue, this stopped being viable.
As you say, journalism made the news prestigious, but the news didn't actually make money either; it was just there to get eyeballs onto the ads.
Distribution was also key in the demise. The business model for decades, explained in one of Buffet's shareholder letters, was to become an area's key source of news: Once you're the last newspaper in town, you get to milk the area. That flew out the window when internet came along.
If they are going to a subscription or patronage model, they will need to cut way more jobs and costs. That type of model can work but you have to run very lean, and you might end up replacing those ad banners with ones begging for money. Organizations like NPR and Wikipedia are some of the largest to use such a model, they have the benefit of goodwill and tax breaks due to their non-profit status, and their cost structure and business model looks very different from most valley startups. You can kiss that valuation goodbye.
The model here isn't NPR or Wikipedia, it's Patreon and Twitch.
The former is traditional philanthropy, but the latter is an interactive way to support content creation. I'm not saying that those models will necessarily translate to Medium, but that certainly seems to be the idea.
I urge anyone that's curious to go give Twitch a quick look. Spend a good half hour in a few different channels. It's really interesting. Some of the streams are what you would expect: skilled gamers playing at a high level. But many of them are very creative in how the develop a community, how they interact with viewers and chat, and what sort of entertainment experience they provide. I think that most people will 'get it' if they watch for a bit. It's compelling entertainment, and lots of people are willing to throw a lot of money at it.
The point is that it's just an entirely different phenomenon from philanthropy. NPR and Wikipedia really have no place in this discussion because they are so different.
The usual sensationalistic headline, but the gist of the story is crystal clear: ads and writing is an inherent and probably impossible-to-solve conflict of interest.
The media that won't change their business model during the next couple of years will probably be extremely diminished in quality, and thus influence. Can't wait.
(And no, the latest fad of "native advertising", with ads disguising as articles, is not the answer. Hopefully this will fall to the wayside as more people learn critical thinking and sourcing [I don't see much evidence for this yet but I'm very hopeful ;) ])
But, the risk of losing the cadre of serious journalists at the large outlets that today are struggling, and who rightfully demand a good salary for their critical work (as members of the fourth estate), is a real one which needs to be solved. If Medium can be a part of forging a new way ahead, then more power to Ev. Haters always gonna hate, often without much thought, self-reflection, or humility.
Ads + Writing worked just fine for most of the last century when print was the only option.
The dead elephant in the room is the fact that the online ad experience is the most irritating and least useful ad experience in all of history.
I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing.
The ads are completely useless to me, because I'm no longer interested in buying A Certain Thing. The ads are useless for the advertiser, because they're paying for nothing. And the ads themselves are usually animated and irritating anyway.
Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.
The online ad industry has never understood the difference between adding value to readers and repeatedly smacking them around the head in a misguided attempt to force them to click the BUY NOW button.
Medium missed the point of all this. The content varies from outstanding to not so good, the design is great. But it's a bit late to be thinking about monetisation, because now it's just replaying the mistakes made by every other media platform over the last decade and a half.
What actually happened to the ideal of rewarding content based on 'attention minutes'?
My experience of Medium is that the content that gets surfaced is from people who are already 'notable' in some other way (think that Medium allowing you to import your Twitter followers and have then auto follow you on Medium doesn't help this), and low value Steve Jobs self-help bullshit.
I can buy into curating 'hidden gems' using data in the way Spotify does, I can get behind breaking unheard voices, but I can't see how the current model of giving famous people a megaphone was ever going to upend journalism.
I've really enjoyed some of the articles I've read on Medium and would love to support the authors. However, one of the hardest things is finding other similar or interesting articles. I'd pay a monthly fee for a list of daily/weekly articles that ML or user like me recommend. I love to learn but the hard thing is sometimes finding the new thing to learn about.
> I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress
Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a company that claims to displace Wordpress it's not unthinkable for it to raise hundreds of millions.
Probably more accurate to say that Medium is a glorified Blogger. I'd argue that the two are better at different things and I sometimes cross-post from Blogger to Medium.
But what I find a bit silly is that Medium often gets held up as a journalistic enterprise when it's just a publishing platform, albeit a nice one.
I deliberately avoid using ambitious publishing platforms. I don't think this is an industry where you can grow your revenue without defeating the purpose of the product. This is an industry where you have to survive on tight margins, and figure out how to reliably provide the service longer than your users live without losing your wife. It's not glamorous, but there is no other way to offer a platform worth publishing on.
If your business is going to fail after less than a decade of hubris and greed, then why not use any other blog platform?
From the article, "industry insiders have growing doubts about Williams' business judgment and are starting to say the company is his vanity project"
This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still a vanity project.
As a blogging platform I'd be happy to pay a few dollars a month, but no more. I look at other platforms like Ghost, who want $20/mo, and I wonder who in their right mind signs up for it. You can host your own site for far less.
That rather depends how you value your time w.r.t the opportunity cost of doing other things. Valuing my marginal time with a purely internal cost metric of $500ph, that $20 equates to a tipping point of 2.5 minutes a month on the complete hosting setup & management. Since it will invariably take more than that even amortized over a year it's a no-brainer: I'm okay with paying for blog hosting, assuming it's a service offering the same capabilities and quality level I'd build for myself.
NB: I receive no additional value clawed back from DIY since I do not desire any additional experience with building, configuring, securing, managing, monitoring and maintaining web servers and/or content management systems.
I view Medium not like a news or blog, but at its best - like the OpEd page of a major newspaper. Medium destroys the average newspaper website experience - ad crazy garbage everywhere.
They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles.
For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some powerful figures like that - retired, out of political offce. Meanwhile they should be also finding the young important voices of the future, who can be had cheap at this point.
What you describe is basically running an online magazine or media organization. You hire writers to write pieces, and users pay a subscription fee. This is what the NYT times. The article mentioned that this was their original business plan but it was scrapped.
I'm going to disagree. I think exclusive blogging content is kind of fundamentally opposed to "how the written internet works" (imo). Building yet another paywall strikes me as a bad idea. I much prefer "soft exclusive" where your site is the preferred one because you make it easy for the writer and the consumer. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'd rather build a "Twitch for journalism" than a "Netflix for journalism" because you compete with free content and a culture of free (Twitch vs. private websites/Youtube etc.) and not vs. other premium content (Netflix vs. TV). Or put yet another way...you don't compete with the Washington Post, you compete with insightful forum discussions and quality private blogs.
Building a good way to monetize good writing is a very hard problem.
> "It comes down to how dysfunctional the place was,"
I'm not an insider by any means, but right from the early days of Twitter, I'd heard this word - dysfunctional - to describe Twitter a lot too. All those "fail whales" and strange and sometimes sheer dickish moves (like pulling API access to developers) were just inexplicable.
I feel medium would have a chance if they allowed video and audio content to be published there. They already have the users that produce such content. Imagine it like a youtube/soundcloud for adults (I don't mean pornographic content). They could then sell many products and services around it.
First, I'd love for Youtube to see more competition.
But, honestly what Youtube are you using? Despite the glut of kid-oriented content on the site, I see almost none of it. The hobby scene alone is a huge segment of the site and caters more to the 30-60 bracket than any other.
"And the move infuriated some of Medium's publishers, who were not warned and had bet their livelihoods on Medium and the business model Williams was ditching."
This reminds me very much of when Dave Winer very suddenly shut down weblogs.com. I remember everyone was furious with him then. The rage was personal back then, as the group of people who were weblogging was smaller, and the folks on weblogs.com tended to be the tech elite, many of whom knew Winer personally.
First of all, thoughts go out to everyone laid off. If there are any SRE/SWE looking to work on ops problems in the Washington/New York areas hit me up.
I really really wanted medium to be successful. Over the past several years I have tried several different places to write/host my blog and medium by far was my favorite. I loved the design, editor and most of all draft/sharing for in-progress posts. I hope they can find a better business model that still keeps same spirit.
[+] [-] epberry|9 years ago|reply
Also, let me just take a moment to once again rage against Business Insider for writing a pretty bad article. The whole thing seemed purposefully antagonistic and full of sarcastic language. Maybe it's because BI is the exact type of operation Medium is trying to kill, but I think those MAU numbers actually warrant some optimism! To be fair, Medium probably should have provided some people to counterbalance all those angry publishers...
[+] [-] Baeocystin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|9 years ago|reply
Also, I think I would pay for the site, definitely, as long as it still somewhat pays publishers who contribute freely to the site in some cases.
[+] [-] madebysquares|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gutigen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnecniv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kartickv|9 years ago|reply
- Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades.
- I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts, but I found them interspersed with his comments on other posts, posts he recommended, random snippets of text in other posts he highlighted. Again, every other blog gets this right — go to the top-level page of the blog, and you get a list of posts in that blog.
- Commenting is bad. To sign in to Medium with a Medium account, it emails me a link to sign in. For every single comment I post. I don't want so many emails. Ideally, they should just use Disqus, so I don't have yet another account.
- In any case, after logging in, the box where I should type a comment wasn't clickable.
- When I opened a second Medium post just a few minutes later, I was again signed out, so couldn't comment.
- There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. Scrolling in a smaller screen area is irritating.
- Comments and posts are mixed up. I'm reading the comment on a post, and it says there are two responses, so I click that, and I'm suddenly taken away from the comments I'm reading. I never know on Medium whether a click will yank me away from what I was reading.
As you can see, Medium breaks a lot of things that were working with every other blog for many years. Please, if you want to innovate, make sure you don't already break what is the norm. That would be like making an "innovative" car that doesn't have seatbelts.
If this is considered "idealistic", I don't mind them failing.
[+] [-] geoka9|9 years ago|reply
That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly) survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen) persistent header...
[+] [-] knight17|9 years ago|reply
Blogger does this exceptionally well, or at least used to in its earlier default templates.
It allows monthly archives to be browsed like a tree, this does not require the page to reload and there is no waiting involved. In WordPress blogs if I click on an archive month, it will load a new page with excerpts of the posts. Without giving me a list of post titles I cannot easily decide what to read. As opposed to Medium, in many WordPress blogs, I can at least use URLs (e.g.: /2012/) to see all the posts from particular year or month, but they are paginated excerpts needing multiple clicks if there are more than a couple of posts.
Blogger had this for a long time and I don't see other templates (static sites[1], WordPress) incorporating this useful feature; this is the only feature that I, as a reader, miss in other blog platforms. Medium is the worst for this type of scan-ability. It focus overtly on prettiness[2] and leaves many usability aspects unaddressed. Presentation ugliness I can deal with Readability, Clearly[3] and similar extensions; usable archive browsing needs to be done well at the server side.
Example: I am on this page (https://darcyhsu.blogspot.com/2015/09/outlining-with-excel.h...) and I can see all his posts without leaving the current page which I arrived from Google. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/9OjiVA5
[1]: Some have list pages which is great. It only requires one extra click
[2]: Not to mention the humongous page sizes
[3]: Evernote killed Clearly
[+] [-] elcapitan|9 years ago|reply
I save almost all Medium posts to Instapaper and read them there, for the same reason, and because it makes it much easier to read.
[+] [-] Traubenfuchs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrwilhelm|9 years ago|reply
I think you should go one by one. They have their own SPA logic, so when you click new article, only the content will be loaded, other parts will stay same.
[+] [-] whack|9 years ago|reply
Ev Williams' mission to change the way journalism is funded and operated though, that's a truly noble ideal. Yes, it's likely too ambitious to succeed. Yes, it's a moonshot. But it's exactly the kind of moonshot that Silicon Valley needs to be taking. It's exactly the kind of moonshot that the world could really benefit from. I applaud him for his decision to put his unicorn at risk, in order to build something that could truly change the world.
[+] [-] navs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anamoulous|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idiot_stick|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morgante|9 years ago|reply
Medium seems to fall into a growing group of companies that are more interested in innovating on their management/internal politics than actually creating innovative products. (Buffer, which also had layoffs and management departures, is another example.) They're very invested in trying new management frameworks like holacracy and signaling a commitment to things like transparency or diversity. This is all well and good (plenty of very successful companies have innovated on internal structures as well).
The problem is when it becomes the entire emphasis of the company. If you look at what people's priorities are, it seems like they're more interested in the company than the product. You can't have two P0s and until you have a successful and profitable product, that needs to be your P0. [0]
[0] Unless you can fund things indefinitely off your personal brand and net worth.
[+] [-] ThomPete|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lazare|9 years ago|reply
The moment the internet gutted ad revenue, this stopped being viable.
As you say, journalism made the news prestigious, but the news didn't actually make money either; it was just there to get eyeballs onto the ads.
[+] [-] ddebernardy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keypusher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Obi_Juan_Kenobi|9 years ago|reply
The former is traditional philanthropy, but the latter is an interactive way to support content creation. I'm not saying that those models will necessarily translate to Medium, but that certainly seems to be the idea.
I urge anyone that's curious to go give Twitch a quick look. Spend a good half hour in a few different channels. It's really interesting. Some of the streams are what you would expect: skilled gamers playing at a high level. But many of them are very creative in how the develop a community, how they interact with viewers and chat, and what sort of entertainment experience they provide. I think that most people will 'get it' if they watch for a bit. It's compelling entertainment, and lots of people are willing to throw a lot of money at it.
The point is that it's just an entirely different phenomenon from philanthropy. NPR and Wikipedia really have no place in this discussion because they are so different.
[+] [-] avocade|9 years ago|reply
The media that won't change their business model during the next couple of years will probably be extremely diminished in quality, and thus influence. Can't wait.
(And no, the latest fad of "native advertising", with ads disguising as articles, is not the answer. Hopefully this will fall to the wayside as more people learn critical thinking and sourcing [I don't see much evidence for this yet but I'm very hopeful ;) ])
But, the risk of losing the cadre of serious journalists at the large outlets that today are struggling, and who rightfully demand a good salary for their critical work (as members of the fourth estate), is a real one which needs to be solved. If Medium can be a part of forging a new way ahead, then more power to Ev. Haters always gonna hate, often without much thought, self-reflection, or humility.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|9 years ago|reply
The dead elephant in the room is the fact that the online ad experience is the most irritating and least useful ad experience in all of history.
I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing.
The ads are completely useless to me, because I'm no longer interested in buying A Certain Thing. The ads are useless for the advertiser, because they're paying for nothing. And the ads themselves are usually animated and irritating anyway.
Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.
The online ad industry has never understood the difference between adding value to readers and repeatedly smacking them around the head in a misguided attempt to force them to click the BUY NOW button.
Medium missed the point of all this. The content varies from outstanding to not so good, the design is great. But it's a bit late to be thinking about monetisation, because now it's just replaying the mistakes made by every other media platform over the last decade and a half.
[+] [-] kristianc|9 years ago|reply
My experience of Medium is that the content that gets surfaced is from people who are already 'notable' in some other way (think that Medium allowing you to import your Twitter followers and have then auto follow you on Medium doesn't help this), and low value Steve Jobs self-help bullshit.
I can buy into curating 'hidden gems' using data in the way Spotify does, I can get behind breaking unheard voices, but I can't see how the current model of giving famous people a megaphone was ever going to upend journalism.
[+] [-] snarf21|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thaxll|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whorleater|9 years ago|reply
Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a company that claims to displace Wordpress it's not unthinkable for it to raise hundreds of millions.
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
But what I find a bit silly is that Medium often gets held up as a journalistic enterprise when it's just a publishing platform, albeit a nice one.
[+] [-] gvb|9 years ago|reply
Wordpress is software that displays a web site's content.
[+] [-] microcolonel|9 years ago|reply
If your business is going to fail after less than a decade of hubris and greed, then why not use any other blog platform?
[+] [-] paulcole|9 years ago|reply
well they were half right
[+] [-] bigtunacan|9 years ago|reply
This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still a vanity project.
[+] [-] x0x0|9 years ago|reply
2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing $.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B).
Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable.
2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and financials available: https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm
edit: thanks @mastazi
[+] [-] transfire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inopinatus|9 years ago|reply
NB: I receive no additional value clawed back from DIY since I do not desire any additional experience with building, configuring, securing, managing, monitoring and maintaining web servers and/or content management systems.
[+] [-] RantyDave|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpweb|9 years ago|reply
They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles.
For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some powerful figures like that - retired, out of political offce. Meanwhile they should be also finding the young important voices of the future, who can be had cheap at this point.
[+] [-] keypusher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|9 years ago|reply
Colin Powell on retainer will make Medium money how?
[+] [-] kriro|9 years ago|reply
Building a good way to monetize good writing is a very hard problem.
[+] [-] ThomPete|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puranjay|9 years ago|reply
I'm not an insider by any means, but right from the early days of Twitter, I'd heard this word - dysfunctional - to describe Twitter a lot too. All those "fail whales" and strange and sometimes sheer dickish moves (like pulling API access to developers) were just inexplicable.
[+] [-] pryelluw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Obi_Juan_Kenobi|9 years ago|reply
But, honestly what Youtube are you using? Despite the glut of kid-oriented content on the site, I see almost none of it. The hobby scene alone is a huge segment of the site and caters more to the 30-60 bracket than any other.
[+] [-] paulcole|9 years ago|reply
You might be on to something here.
>(I don't mean pornographic content)
Oh, never mind.
[+] [-] lkrubner|9 years ago|reply
"And the move infuriated some of Medium's publishers, who were not warned and had bet their livelihoods on Medium and the business model Williams was ditching."
This reminds me very much of when Dave Winer very suddenly shut down weblogs.com. I remember everyone was furious with him then. The rage was personal back then, as the group of people who were weblogging was smaller, and the folks on weblogs.com tended to be the tech elite, many of whom knew Winer personally.
[+] [-] johnbellone|9 years ago|reply
I really really wanted medium to be successful. Over the past several years I have tried several different places to write/host my blog and medium by far was my favorite. I loved the design, editor and most of all draft/sharing for in-progress posts. I hope they can find a better business model that still keeps same spirit.
[+] [-] StevePerkins|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overcast|9 years ago|reply