Medium Should Just Buy Pocket

Some people would say there’s too much content on the web. We’ll never be able to consume it all so we look only for the best.

This is what Medium is all about.

In designing how Medium works, we had a few goals: help good stuff get the attention it deserves, no matter who the author is.

After becoming known, early on, as a tech blogging site with a nice interface it steadily began recruiting better writers.

The acquisition of the news web magazine Matter.com and the launch of Backchannel, by way of hiring Steven Levy, author of an 800 page tome about Google, were all a part of that. While Backchannel reinforced Medium’s techie emphasis, it did give it serious clout among journalists. Matter has since been spun off as it’s own company.

Having built out a strong content ecosystem it then needed to do something about its readers, who had become wary of publishing their own content out of the fear that it wasn’t good enough. This is where Medium added responses. They have a twofold purpose: they ensure that trolling is kept to a minimum (every response also appears on a user’s profile) and moves people away from the idea that they need to have a pristine profile, with only high quality content, to be able to participate on Medium.

Having successfully balanced out the needs of users and high quality content, it is now looking to take all that one step further by attracting existing publications.

The Publishing Platform is the way. This gives publishers the possibility to create a new publication with little to no technical investment, migrate their existing website to Medium and even participate in a beta to monetize their content.

The strategy is certainly working as it is attracting existing, but small, publications like The Awl, The Billfold. Bill Simmons, the former editor-in-chief of Grantland, also announced that he would be using Medium to launch his new publication, The Ringer. Sports Illustrated already has a spin-off publication on Medium and both Time and Fortune are planning on launching off-shoots.

But here comes a new challenge. You’ve attracted smaller publications. Your readers are associating you with high quality content. To continue to grow, you need existing publications to use your platform and grow your user base. The NY Times, Vox and other major outlets are still using their own platforms, with the hope that their content doesn’t get commoditized.

Vox’s CMS, called Chorus, has been one of the online publishing network’s main products, which has found many fans in the publishing industry.

But this is something that will eventually happen either way, as the amount of media content becomes overwhelming, which is why a move towards long-form and analysis will become natural. It’s also something that Medium is probably banking on.

Meanwhile, Pocket has been building itself into an OTT for the publishing industry, with a strong user facing content discovery system. Having started out as a simple tool to save the articles you don’t have the time to read in the moment, for that point in the day when you do, it has gradually moved to a media social network, with recommendations and the ability to follow people and what they’re reading. The personal feed is platform agnostic with the goal of surfacing only the best content.

This is increasingly sounding like Medium’s mission: to become the platform for the best content.

There is one user facing feature that is missing from Medium’s mobile apps, which is the core feature of Pocket: the ability to take articles with you offline. For anybody using public transportation (London’s Tube, Paris’ metro or New York’s Subway) this feature is a godsend. Now imagine the articles that you save to Pocket visualized in the same clean interface as Medium. And imagine Pocket’s recommended feed in your Medium sidebar. Regardless of whether an article is hosted on Medium or not it appears in the same interface, drawing users to the platform. The pull it would have on users would eventually force publishers to adopt Medium’s platform. It’s where all their users are anyways.

This could also solve Pocket monetization challenge. The app has been free for a long time now and it’s hard to get people to pay for a Premium plan that only gives you a permanent library, better tagging and no ads (there are ads on Pocket?! Yup). And Pocket is facing increased competition. Facebook has locked Pocket users out by integrating the same feature directly into their own app and just a month ago Google quietly added the same feature to its own Chrome browser and you can also save articles to its email app Inbox. This will put increasing pressure on Pocket, which raised a total of $14.5 million and is likely running on that plus the fumes of its Premium plan. At some point Pocket will either have to bombard it’s users with ads, which would lead to an exodus, or become a part of another ecosystem.

That ecosystem can only be Medium. A combination of the two could make them the go-to publishing and discovery platform for the web’s best content.