Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast
forbes.com
forbes.com
A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising.
So what's the benefit of Medium over the website of my newspaper, where the newspaper has 100% control of the appearance, content, advertisers, additional revenue streams and so on?
Furthermore: I don't read that many magazines or newspapers. But when I do, I make the conscious decision to read a specific magazine or newspaper, because they have a certain opinion on things I'd like to know about. Medium blends all of this in some uni-branded way and at the end of the day, people don't care about the publisher/brand anymore.
The last time you bought something on eBay or Aamzon Marketplace, do you know the actual shop's name within the marketplace? Probably not. This is not desirable for publishers and thus, I don't believe that Medium will be the future. It's merely an experiment for publishers to play with, to get more traffic to their own websites (frequently you see the last paragraph stating "first appeared on wired.com" or whatever).
Creating content on Medium is easier than doing your own website. So is getting readers.
Once the platform is even more crowded, the readers won't come themselves. You need to actively market your content and then the question is: Why would you market Medium's platform instead of your own?
Of course, they have not really solved the issue of investigative journalism, the risk of which requires deeper pockets and the backing of a well-renowned organization such as Reuters, NYT, … to get you out of difficult situations.
They do not have a solution implemented either. They have yet to meet the issues of ad blockers, aggressive or intrusive ads, privacy, or how to pick a premium price that matches the ad revenue that would otherwise be generated.
While Evan Williams cited Facebook, he also dismissed search (and searchability), which is unwise. Facebook's largest issue is precisely that. People tend not to find content they are interested in, and they struggle to tweak their stream's algorithm to fix that.
All in all, the newspapers they aim to disrupt have a head start of about five years, and what they consider their real competition are struggling on problems they have not faced yet.
> Medium blends all of this in some uni-branded way and at the end of the day, people don't care about the publisher/brand anymore.
> Once the platform is even more crowded, the readers won't come themselves. You need to actively market your content and then the question is: Why would you market Medium's platform instead of your own?
I have read a number of things on medium, but to be honest, I couldn't remember who wrote most of them. The homogeneous design, while visually appealing and easy to read, means I rarely remember whose blog I was reading on medium. The lack of identity in the design seems like it would impede branding and marketing. Which then means it's going to be tough to make money, even if they add in paywall, advertising, etc.
The one thing I'd like Blendle to add, but maybe they did so already, is the ability to follow journalists. A number of my friends, for example, are freelancers and publish in multiple publications.
So, Williams starts off at Blogger, which hasn't solved the problem of making money for content creators yet, really. To be fair to it, nor has Tumblr or Wordpress. Then he moves to Odeo, a pdocasting company, which fails to solve the monetization problem for podcast creators so hard that it pivots into enterprise video library SaaS solutions. Then he moves to Twitter, which isn't even trying to solve the problem of how to compensate content creators and is frankly not looking so good in terms of making enough money to pay itself. And now Williams is at Medium, where they haven't solved that problem QUITE YET.
Quite yet.
God help me, some days I feel like I'm just staring out into a world gone mad.
Medium is like a set of unmarked vans where the cooks and cuisine change every day. Sometimes there will be something you don't normally get (I would kill for a decent Indian spot in this town) but other times you would rather have what you're comfortable with, and enough subpar experiences would make you wary of coming back.
I used to read Medium, a lot. They had some interesting slice-of-life pieces I doubt I'd ever see at the New York Times or the Economist. But nowadays it seems like a lot of self-congratulatory startup humblebrag stories, and for most of them I'm starting to wonder if their prominence has less to do with the quality of their writing and more about their relationship with the Medium staff.
And it taps into a discussion I had with another friend of mine who is a founder of a venture backed company.
His claim was that he wanted to create a workplace that wasn't like those old industries which exploited it's workers.
My claim was that the only reason he could even care about that was because he was backed. The second you actually have to make a profit and there is no potential investor waiting to bail you out lets see how nice you are going to be.
In other words. It's easy to want to change the world and do things different when you don't have to create profit but just grow. It's when you have to make a profit every single day the true nature of your business become apparent.
I think there's a large market of indie publishers who will continue to do well of their site & using things like medium.com as an outlet or satelite outreach. I think it's the newspapers that have bigger problems.
Also, it's a pet peeve of mine when they proclaim something is dead and then when pushed for details on how their service is going to solve it - they say "oh, don't worry, trust us."
For example, this exchange:
> Battelle: How am I going to make money on Medium?
> Williams: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. We will. We’re not going to invent some new way to make money from publishing. Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising. You can do branded/sponsored content on Medium, but there are no tools yet. We will have them, though.
Okay, so there's no way to make money off of Medium right now - got it.
Then, he immediately goes on to say:
> If you’re starting something today, within a year, you’ll make more money on Medium than you would publishing on your own.
Really? After you just told me that you can't make money on medium? I get that you need to paint the picture of the future where your product solves every little problem, but that seemed a little over the top.
And yes, I get it. Williams is much more successful than me and has done a lot more exits, but from his work, it seems like he's very good at building platforms, and infrastructure, but the monetization methods (for the users), isn't really there.
Still, there's far too much noise in a platform that hosts so much published content. Of course, I could "follow" a group's collected writings, but it just isn't the same as reading from a publisher's actual, custom-branded, web presence.
I mean, take Rock Paper Shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/). For those who don't know, they're an online news blog covering games with a special balance between the mainstream and the indie and a certain taste that I can't quite put my finger on.
Medium is an awful, awful fit for these guys. It just doesn't have the right style to fit their needs.
And he did go on to mention that there will be other platforms, naturally, but how many? How many will it take to satisfy the wild originality of the collective internet?
But whatever. Unfortunately an easy tactic for a startup to gain publicity is for their CEO to say something mildly controversial. Not something smart per-say, just controversial.
As a reader I never start at Medium - the only way I ever read something there is through references from HN or reddit
For somethings, like giving Google specific permissions to make my life easier, I am willing to go with huge companies when I want things like Google Now to work. It is worth the privacy hit (sometimes) to have voice interfaces to my calendar, what music I want to listen to, generating quick notes, warnings of air flight delays, etc.
But, for content, I like to go to the sources (like democracynow.org) not the aggregators. While I enjoy reading some content on Medium, I can't help but think the writers are better off having their own domain and work long term to develop their personal brand. I think that social media like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter have value for publishing references to your work that is on your site, on your domain. I think of social media as micro-blogging: stuff that is short and doesn't derserve a full length article on your own site. Social media is also great for pointing people to good writing on people's sites.
So, I would say go with huge companies (Apple for Siri, Google for Google Now, Microsoft for Cortana) for specific services that have value. For everything else, support small producers.