Reader Q & A
What’s going on with the big changes at Medium?
Dear Greg,
I know there are some big changes at Medium. It just sounds like they’re not profitable and a bit of a mess. Does most of your advice [from The Ultimate Guide To Medium] still apply or is it too soon to know? Have the changes been rolled out or just announced?
Thank you,
Janet, online reporter at NewspaperGirl
Let’s start off by setting the stage for Janet’s questions. When she mentions the “big changes” at Medium, she’s referring to the shake up that happened in late May of 2015. Medium is focusing its efforts on strengthening the network and community. Consequently, they’ve had to pull resources from their internally supported content efforts. A number of popular publications — including Re:form, The Nib, and War Is Boring — were either shuttered or decided to move their content elsewhere.
If you were paid by Medium to write, or to run a publication, then these changes were probably quite material to your bottom line. But most likely, you are not a paid contributor. So, nothing significantly affects you. It’s business as usual. If anything, this is a good thing for the average writer.
In my admittedly speculative opinion, Medium is moving to make the network even more of a meritocracy. They want to empower the average writer, not play favorites with the publications that are on their payroll. And while this may result in a short term drop of quality content, we are all going to be appreciative of these changes in the long run.
Medium is most likely not profitable, and to the outsider, things perhaps do look like a mess. But we all need to give Medium the benefit of the doubt — there are dozens of brilliant people on the team who care greatly about the product and the community. Things are still early enough to chalk this up as an experiment, and getting through the storm now means calmer seas ahead. Love it or hate it, Medium is still a giant petri dish. There are going to be bumps along the way. Patience, young grasshoppers.
This is a long term play. Medium has taken on one of the most ambitious goals of the modern digital publishing era, and fruition will not happen quickly. Perhaps I would be more worried if the man in charge — Mr. Ev Williams — was a first time founder & CEO. But he’s not. He previously founded Blogger and Twitter, and unless you’ve been living in a cave since the last millennium, you know that both products fundamentally shifted the way we communicate. Medium is his third iteration of a formula that has worked well before — give people the tools to communicate and watch what happens. With more experience under his belt than ever before, it seems unlikely that Ev doesn’t have a penultimate destination for Medium.
In short, keep writing great content, and you have nothing to worry about.
Curious how to get the most out of Medium? I’m Greg Muender, and I literally wrote the book on it. Pick up your copy here, and you’ll get access to the tips and tricks that have been proven to work to get more readers and more exposure.
