Let’s Talk About Medium
They’re changing it up, but how?
Today I wanted to write something about the announcement from Medium over a change in their editorial strategy. There’s tons of conversation about the future of writing and publishing and it seems like Medium is responding to it. Here, I breakdown some of the important parts about Medium’s announcement and give a little commentary on what their changes will look like and why.
Medium announced recently that they’re changing up their strategy when it comes to editorial. This marks a shift in who their business model focuses on, but begs the question of how dramatic the change will be.
Facing pressure from the rise of Sovereign Writer platforms like Substack, Medium is questioning it’s very traditional way of “disrupting” publishing. New business models serve as a “business model in a box” for writers, positioning themselves as platforms instead of being publishers. Medium has essentially established itself as a challenger publication to incumbent leaders like the New York Times, Wall St Journal, and more.
From Ev Williams, CEO and founder of Medium:
“Our goal was never to replicate the traditional publishing model because we saw the challenges the industry was going through. Rather, we believed we could find a new model that would allow professional writers and editors to do their best work.”
I find this somewhat challenging to grasp simply because their model was nearly exactly the same as traditional publishing models. They just re-arranged compensation to be directly related to the value of the article published and opened up opportunities for new writers. Their publication model still has many of the core elements of a publisher, namely a gatekeeper in the form of an editor. If you’ve ever tried to publish an article to a Medium publication, you know that there’s still this bottle neck in the publishing process.
“The bet was that we could develop these brands, and they would develop loyal audiences that would grow the overall Medium subscriber base. What’s happened, though, is the Medium subscriber base has continued to grow, while our publication’s audiences haven’t.”
It’s clear that people willing to pay for content don’t want massive publications carefully planning the content that they read. This is part of the reason why Substack has been so successful.
The strategy that Williams discusses in the quote above shows the misguided focus of Medium when it comes to content. In an open market, readers will choose to read, and to pay for, the content that they want. Its not about brands, segmentation, or carefully planned content. People want the content they want.
For Medium, they wanted to make their money on gated publications. But, information wants to be free and this isn’t something that publications allow by virtue of their bottleneck.
New models shift the publication responsibilities to the author, removing the bottleneck of publishing and truly opening up the playing field. This is one of the common complaints from journalists in the conversation about substack, but it seems like Medium is putting a dog into this fight:
“For the foreseeable future, we will focus that talent on supporting independent voices on our platform. This means identifying writers — both already on Medium and not — and offering them deals, support, editing, and feedback to help them tell great stories and find their audience.”
So what does the future look like for Medium? As a paying subscriber, and also a writer, I have a few thoughts.
Looking at the competition and pressure they face from new companies and consumer demands I expect them to become more of a platform than a publisher. They’re allowing current writers to leave with a generous package, and are aiming to support new writers. My guess is that they’re going to focus on shipping product that enables the writing process and play into their advantage of aggregated demand for articles.
Paying for individual publications or writers on a subscription basis has been proven as a way to monetize the platform and arguably offers greater revenue for the companies employing this model. Medium currently charges $5/mo or $50/year for unlimited access to all publications. People who pay for content have at a minimum 1 paid subscription which is typically around the current price for the current plan. It’s not uncommon for people to pay for several different subscriptions. This is a huge missed revenue opportunity.
The “business model in a box” approach is popular for current writers as they don’t need to worry about setting up their business — it’s plug and play. Medium has the advantage of already having existing relationships with current writers. So when they compete with services like Ghost or Substack they’re (possibly) able to catch up quickly as a platform in terms of # of writers. The question becomes: how does Medium differentiate?
One of mediums biggest pulls on writers is that they have access to aggregated demand for articles as well as better discoverability for new writers via SEO. According to SimilarWeb, Medium pulls in ~210M visitors each month. When the alternative to starting a blog or publication of your own is a WordPress site, Medium is clearly superior as you’re building on top of a platform that already has readers coming to it and a good track record of getting articles in search results. In some sense, Medium is a marketplace.
Medium is definitely a game changer for new writers or those without huge followings on other platforms like Twitter. I myself write mainly on Substack so that I can own the connection to the people who subscribe and be able to send this to you directly, but I also distribute on Medium because of it’s reach.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Medium got into the newsletter game. Copying winners as a product strategy has been great for companies like Twitter and Facebook, and I don’t mean this in a condescending way. Medium also has a lot of strengths to play into. Tapping into the huge number of visitors to their site to enable discovery for writers is huge and something that’s lacking from Substack. The ability to send a newsletter is something that’s easily copied and doesn’t create a sustainable advantage.
Medium has the ability to build much more on top of owned distribution and strongly hold a portion of the market of Sovereign Writers. Even though Medium is getting into this game late, they have a huge head start.
Originally published at https://goodwillfactories.substack.com.
