(In this analogy, I suppose eating it would be making money, and so far, there's no sign Medium is doing anything but stockpiling cake.)
They could have their cake and a free one, too.
They got a bunch of great free stuff they could promote and any crap that got published on Medium didn't besmirch the great work they were doing with their paid-for stories. They could skim the cream, and let the bad posts just sink, unloved and unshared. Until recent weeks, this seemed like a tremendous strategy. It was almost an evolved Huffington Post or Forbes, with similar editorial chops at the high end and a better blogging platform at the low end (minus the relentless social media stuff). It would be as if LiveJournal simultaneously built The Verge. They would and could do what we could do, but merely as a component of their overall strategy. Medium wasn't building a magazine, I realized, but a magazine killer. You want a smart "second-day" take on the news? Oh, here's this post on Medium.Īll that made sense, too, given that the company was hiring elite web editors. Medium seemed to be a machine for generating the kind of passaroundable content that does so well on Twitter. Pieces that might have run on The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or Wired would pop up on Medium, and I'd be like, "Dang. (Sub-strategy: Don't disclose who's working for Medium and who's working on Medium.) 4) Promote the people they've paid along with a very small subset of everyone else.Īll this built the idea that Medium was something more than yet another blogging platform. 3) Pay some people to post to the site, but not most of them. 2) Very slowly release control of who can use Medium to create cachet. McConlogue and Shih were just blogging, as people have done since Blogger and Wordpress evolved.įrom the outside, Medium's strategy has seemed to be the following: 1) Create a beautiful, simple blogging platform, which Medium most certainly is. The Norton and Davis articles were clearly driven by Medium's in-house editors like former chief Evan Hansen (for whom I used to work). The posts on Medium are arrived at in different ways. And Catalano's story was fascinating, even if ultimately proved that her husband's former employer was paranoid more than it proved anything about the nature of government surveillance. The second two are the opposite of awesome. Journalist Michele Catalano's post about Googling for backpacks and pressure cookers, then having law enforcement visit her house.
Over the last year, Medium's momentum has been building, and as it grows, the tensions between these sentiments is beginning to show. Medium, he said, was "a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends." While Medium might look like a standard blogging platform, a content management system, it had been "designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world." And yet "it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say."Īt the time, I didn't notice the contradiction between the normative idea that Medium was some particular kind of publication - that "a Medium" was a genre - and the platform idea that Medium was for anyone to do anything and "find the right audience." Ev Williams announced the site in a post. The new site was invite-only, but outsiders could read from various collections. Just about a year ago, a new website from two of the founders of Twitter launched.