Medium is beautiful. Even if you don’t write, reading articles on Medium makes you want to start. OR maybe it’s the community. There is a real personal, inside feel to the articles written here.
This personal feel was carefully crafted by the founder when Medium started. Founder Evan Williams had previously founded both Blogger and Twitter, Williams is even credited with inventing the word “blogger”. Medium was originally the closest next step from Blogger and Twitter, a micro blogging platform that was simple and fun to publish to. The content was organized by collections which worked mainly as writing prompts and catered mainly to prompting personal stories. This collection by early user Michele Catalano is a good snapshot of the early content posted on Medium. Short, quirky and personal. Take a personal tweet you might want to post, think about how you might expand that tweet into a short blog post and you have Medium’s beginnings.
Some other key distinctions were that Medium had no way to follow authors, no time stamp on articles and therefore no reverse chronological content feeds. Content was only organized by collections. The aim was to keep writers from feeling burdened to write regularly in order to appease or even accrue a following. The idea was just to be a simple, no strings attached playground for people to write in and read for the pleasure of doing so and nothing more.
And it grew quickly.. is still growing quickly, and much has changed. As Medium opened their doors and ditched their invite only system, the team has been having to make hard decisions on how they want to shape their community and voice. Collections have been ditched for categories, a content news feed and “publications” (more on that later). Content is now time stamped and feeds are now reverse-chronological. Following writers is now an option and recommendations are the most pushed engagement metric in order to drive their content discovery algorithm and generally work as a “like” function for readers to digitally affirm their approval/enjoyment of the article to the community/author.
With these changes, Medium is starting to work and look more like a typical publisher. The main differentiation left being their recommendations driven content discovery algorithm (which is getting phased out more and more) and their beautiful design.
Collections were getting too crowded, weren't properly managed by their owners and just generally were losing their value. Many of the changes make sense for a community that is getting crowded. With every community, as things get noisy, something has to give in the battle of discovery vs content.
Where Medium could be headed
Like any company, as Medium matures it ultimately has to find a sustainable revenue source. Follow the revenue and you’ll find the future. For now, Medium’s most promising route to revenue has been its newly added “Publications” series. These work like digital magazines around certain focused topics. Like collections used to work, they can be started by companies, organizations, individuals. They are then updated regularly with content from authors allowed to write for the publication. Reform is a publication sponsored by BMW. This was Medium’s first attempt at monitizing their platform and it looks like they have been doubling down on publications ever since.
Content from publications dominates the content found on your home news feed and each category feed. Whether that is from an internal algorithm push to promote publication’s content or it’s just the result of content from publications being well written and well received — is hard to tell. But ultimately it leaves Medium’s content at a crossroads of two competing sources, open community content and exclusive publications content. You can see Medium isn't even sure how to handle merging these two currently as their publications page isn't discoverable from the home page. Even if you find this publications page, it is just a nondescript search box void of even some suggestions or a popular list. The only way to find publications at this point are to happen upon an article which was published through one, notice the article was published on a publication and click through to it. It’s clear Medium is still deciding how to mold together these two sources.
Moving towards publications make sense from a revenue standpoint and even as a value standpoint as publications will have more quality control. But as publications become more popular, they will continue to dominate community space. Community members not writing for publications are going to be continually pushed into a smaller and smaller box of displayed content. It will be next to impossible (as it pretty much already is) for a community member without an audience to get their content discovered. Only writers posting through publications or writers with large audiences they had accrued pre-changes will be able to get their content above the fold and found by readers.
This isn't the only battle shaping the future of Medium. As publications continues to grow, more pressure will be put on the issue of paid writers vs free writers. Yes, Medium is paying writers, some of them at least. These select few now mainly head the content being submitted through Medium’s publications as the quality bar there has to be high if they are going to sell companies on the idea of sponsoring them. This paid vs. free issue will create a divide between authors.
If the quality bar has to be high to be able to post on Publications, how can you argue one writer being compensated for their work on that publication and another writer doing so for free? Because Medium is beautiful and fun to write on? Or the general cut your teeth now, earn an income later promise? Both writers had to pass the same quality bar.
Again, I believe this is another factor that will erode away the community contributors as it does on every other publishing platform when some writers are getting paid and others aren't. Even the free contributors that have made their way onto writing for publications will dwindle as they find the quality bar continue to rise and their value gained remaining stagnant.
Let me try and explain visually the effect the current incentive structure will have on Medium.
Now I’m assuming a lot here. Sponsored publications is just Medium’s first attempt at revenue. Evan Hansen, a senior member of Medium’s team, noted “We’re in exploratory moment,” “It’s not about the money, it’s about the experiment”. This is still early days for their revenue model. A startup can and will go through many iterations before finding the right fit.
With this piece I’m looking at what Medium might look like if sponsored publications continue to be the revenue model. The answer being, magazines for the web written by talented (paid) journalists. Magazines are still relatively popular for both their aesthetically pleasing reading experience and a focus on industry defining content. Newspapers have had a much harder time due to their focus on timely content which the web does a much better job at providing. But just like newspapers, magazines have had to make the switch to online publishing in order to stay relative.
Look at that chart and realize you are looking at a 97 billion dollar industry making its transition to online publishing. Medium has done what many others haven’t been able to which is replicate magazine’s aesthetically pleasing reading experience and design onto the web. This is something magazines are struggling to accomplish. And given their lack of a background in tech, it’s something they will likely continue to struggle with. This coupled with Medium’s focus on industry defining long form content and their new flagship product “Publications”, leaves Medium seemingly aimed at being to magazines what the Huffington Post is to newspapers.
As a community writer or reader on Medium, what are your thoughts about this? Do you like this direction for Medium? What will be lost? What will be gained? Do you see Medium headed in a different direction? Lets start a dialogue and talk about it while Medium is in this transition period and making these key community shaping decisions.
Click to Tweet: with publications, is @medium looking to be to magazines what @thehuffpost_ is to newspapers?
