4 Reasons Why
Medium Is The Future Of Media
I have now been using Medium for over three months and I have no hesitation in saying that I believe, once again, Ev and team are going to score a huge success in the world of consumer internet. I am not an investor in Medium therefore I have no personal benefits in highlighting the company: my only motivation on the topic is my personal intellectual curiosity to debate what I believe will be a new significant trend: content as a product.
Why I love medium
Medium is first and foremost a technology platform and is built with the typical logic of any consumer internet service and a very simple objective in mind: provide users with an enjoyable lasting consumer experience. However, at the same time, I also think Medium is first and foremost a content company. Exactly this mix of consumer internet and content DNAs are at the core of the Medium pathos.
Why I think Content is a product
In this world we are used to the idea that products are built to pleasure consumers. This is of course true for both physical products and digital once. Many companies have built a fortune as online retailers in both physical and digital categories: Zappos, Yoox, Spotify, NetFlix. Sophisticated recommendation engines and optimisation tools are the basis of their success.
Next generation gaming companies such as Zynga, Supercell, King and Wooga are building games based on continuos consumer feedback. This is exactly what makes these companies different from the old world gaming company based on the philosophy of spending $50M plus to build a fantastic new game in the HOPE that consumers will love it.
As soon as we look at media companies and the way how they have been thinking of their product also known as content, all suddenly everything we have learned in the last 20 years of the internet age is forgotten in a heartbeat. Most media companies create and manage content in the exact same old way in which they used to create the page of their newspapers. In most cases they have just used the web as a distribution platform but have not really taken advantage of the technology to transform the end-product: the content itself.
I think there are four areas in which Medium is providing some serious innovation and a lot of this innovation could be learned/implemented by tradition media companies.
1 — Products are tested
Medium does a super job in helping writers to test content. You write your piece on a draft and share it with friends and industry experts. You capture their feedback and you make it better. Annotations are a powerful tool and Medium is just scratching the surface of what is possible. I am sure that soon we will be able to a/b test titles, subtitles and hope formatting.
This is a mentality that does not exist in most content companies out there. The content is not tested is pushed down to consumers: in any case is a page view, maybe at a standard CPM.
2 — Products are measured
Although, obviously super early, the stats page of Medium is addicting to any writer: you can see who read it, who just viewed the article, who is recommending it, where the readers come from etc. All this data, and much more, are the key to any eTailers. The level of sophistication of analytics is at the core of the optimisation of any web site.
However, this does not happen in content companies. Media companies tend to measure their audience for advertising purposes but very little do in terms of using analytics to optimise their pages, improve their content and measure lasting consumer engagement. I make the point that media companies should be massive customers of services such as Mixpanel (actions speak louder than page views).
3 — Distribution is key
Medium social fabric is the basis of a reader based distribution strategy. As result Medium is able to leverage the existing social network of any writer and top of it up with a traffic machine able to drive readers to different articles.
Media companies have been fighting the social media activities of some of their employees and very little have done in terms of creating traffic patterns to drive consumers from articles to articles.
4— Lasting content and Global ambitions
Most of Medium content is there to stay and is relevant across the world for long time because of the nature of the content itself. We will see original content generated in many different languages. The community of writers is pretty much never ending and will create a multitude of long tail experts on pretty much everything. The community dynamic of Medium is very unique and reminds me a lot of the beginning of Twitter (a niche super passionate community).
Traditional media companies often produces content in one language only and their content is mostly characterised by a short term shelf value. Many media companies could leverage their brands to build better quality content but most of them have to deal with the inflexibility of the rigid cost structure of the newsrooms.
I do believe
that Medium has the potential to become the
New York Times of the future.
I hope that traditional media companies inspired by Medium will understand that is time to take advantage of the internet to provide consumers with content they love. I realise that this is a difficult debate because editorial teams could argue that this could compromise their editorial independence. I do love independence and I love editorial teams: I just wish they would spend more time in understanding what consumers love and engage with…yea…long term engagement like in any consumer internet company!
