Is Medium letting us down?
What it means to be a writer/blogger on Medium and why the platform has changed the way it has.
My name’s Andreas and I’ve been on Medium since basically the very beginning, with my account opened on August 16, 2012, seven years ago almost to the day.
My first story, however, I posted much later, in February 2014. It was a post on Crowdsourcing tips and ideas for digital diplomacy, created with the support of many colleagues including Andra Alexandru and Andreea Hanganu, co-founders of DigitalDiplomacy.ro; Daniella Fisher, then at the Consulate General of Canada in Minneapolis; Stéphane Le Mentec, then at the Embassy of Canada to France; Matthias Lüfkens, creator of the Twiplomacy study; Fernando Márquez, then at Enova; Martha McLean at Global Affairs Canada; Jarrett Reckseidler 🌐 , then at the Mission of Canada to the EU; Nicolas Sabourin, then at the Embassy of Canada to The Netherlands; Scott Nolan Smith, co-founder of the DigitalDiplomacyCoalition. The story has since then reached 1,400 views.
I didn’t start to write and blog on Medium more consistently until July 2016, when I launched Digital Diplomacy, a Medium publication about technology and innovation in government and beyond.
It’s now a little over 3 years and I feel Medium has changed in a way that it’s now more difficult then ever to readers — even with my own account’s 7,100+ followers and Digital Diplomacy’s 45,000 followers.
Of course, over the years I contributed other Medium publications, including Hackernoon and The Startup, bringing new readers to Digital Diplomacy, some of whom have joined as contributors.
But during these past years, the changes Medium implemented have made the platform unique. Both in good ways and in bad ways. In a way, however, the bad is canceling the good. And in doing so, maybe, Medium and its founder Ev Williams are letting us down.
Curation is now a major thing on Medium and, unless you get curated, bringing readers in is hardly happening.
“In time, most stories we recommend to readers will be part of Medium’s paywall,” wrote in February Michael Sippey, VP Product at Medium. “If you choose to have your story reviewed by a curator, and it is approved and then recommended to Medium readers, your story will most likely be part of Medium’s metered paywall.”
I was reading this morning a story by Shaunta Grimes, a Medium power writer who’s experimenting with a new account to see how easy — or not — is to build a following on the platform. It seems clear to me that unless you’re curated, today’s Medium does not reach many outside of your basin. And building a large pool of followers only happens when you are indeed curated. A vicious cycle it seems.
Publications are still and important way to push out stories on the platform. Howerver, some like Hackernoon have left for good, others have been bought by Medium, and a few have been launched by the company itself, like OneZero, currently looking for a editor-in chief; Gen, headed by Brendan Vaughan; Forge by Indrani Sen; or even Elemental and Zora by Vanessa K. De Luca.
And Medium is growing this side of the business, with more original content coming. According to Marla Lepore in a post on Muck Rack, Steve LeVine, former editor and lead writer of Axios’s Future newsletter, Danielle Sacks, previously executive editor at inc. magazine, and Jean-Luc Bouchard, formerly a senior content strategist at Acorns, have joined Medium’s yet-to-be-named new business magazine.
According to Digiday, “Driving the growth [of Medium] is a mix of professional and amateur content,” wrote Max Willens last year, highlighting that “Medium’s pivot from advertising to subscription revenue in early 2017 is a high-stakes one for a company that’s raised $132 million in venture capital and has precious little to show for it, revenue-wise.”
Willens spoke to Medium’s first VP of Editorial Siobhan O’Connor, who “admired Medium founder Ev Williams and his decision to shift Medium away from advertising.” O’Connor’s job, says Willes, “is to give people amateur and professional content that they want to read while figuring out how to bring human curation and editorial judgment into an algorithmically powered platform used by 50,000 writers a week [in 2018].”
“The reason we’re investing so much in editorial is because the business model is working,” O’Connor told recently Sara Jerde in Adweek.
The business model is working. But does the platform work for all its users?
Obviously, many still love Medium, and some are making good money. “Did you know, the most influential writers on Medium can make over $20,000 a month,” wrote recently Michael K. Spencer. “Tell your friends, this content paradise platform is for real.”
And according to Casey Botticello, in July 2019: 57% of writers or publications who wrote at least one story for members earned money; 7.9% of active writers earned over $100; $22,639.47 was the most earned by a writer, and $6,720.35 was the most earned for a single story.
Do writers just want to make money? How has the new model changed Medium’s readership? I don’t know. My goal is to write because I enjoy writing, not because I want to make money. Am I the only one feeling this way?
This does not mean Medium is not relevant any longer. I still love the platform and the content I find on it. But it does mean I’m writing less and less. I think the same are doing many other writers and bloggers, including in the political arena, once one of Medium’s main priorities — for example, during the 2016 US presidential elections. Of course, politics today is still a popular tag on the platform, and some of the 2020 US presidential candidates are still posting, most recently Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar ‘s Amy for America— both on gun control — Joe Biden, Bill de Blasio, and Kamala Harris, just to mention a few examples.
Food for thought.
