The story so far with Medium

A friend of mine who works at Automattic once moved his personal blog from a self-hosted WordPress site to Medium. He wanted to research if there was any effective network effect on the platform. After just a couple of weeks, he moved back to WordPress. His page-view count didn’t go up, and while he gave lots of credit to Medium for trying to build a platform that had the ability to bring discovery and spark conversations between like-minded people, he eventually concluded that Medium wasn’t just there yet. I believe he didn’t give the platform a serious shot.

I have been working in digital publishing for the last 6 years. I have engaged in confrontational discussions around platforms, business models, editorial planning and technology because I care, a lot. I have stakes in publishing projects, I have clients who are newspaper publishers, and yet I didn’t ever challenge myself with bloggers. My views are biased by the fact that every bit of my experience has been built around professional publishers who need to make a living out of their product.

Network effect

I’m lucky enough to be now able to perform a more thorough research than my friend did months ago. I have a stake in Latterly, one of the few publications approved for the Medium revenue beta program. I previously wrote an article about publishing platforms and at the time I wasn’t happy with Medium distribution. I was wrong: the medium network effect exists, it is strong, and it is of the direct type. The one that everyone feels by using the…