A month at Medium
As my first month writing for Medium on a daily basis comes to a close, I’d like to share a few first impressions about the site. Think of it as a “meta-post”…
What’s particularly interesting about Medium for me is that it provides me with an opportunity to reach an English-speaking readership. I have been writing my blog in Spanish for the last decade or so, reaching a large number of people in the process; thus, making the step to English was a logical one. Most of my sources are written in English, a significant part of my education was conducted in English, and most of my teaching at IE Business School is now delivered in English as well. Although I do not use my website for teaching purposes, the fact that a significant number of my students like to keep up with the things that interest their teacher has meant that not having a page with my content in English has increasingly become something of a need. What’s more, given that my page generally garners a certain amount of attention in the media, it has made sense to broaden its scope beyond the Spanish press.
Furthermore, a redesign of my blog was in the offing, so I took advantage to make room for entries in Spanish and English. At that moment, Medium appeared as the perfect way to test the waters while the redesign was underway; a temporary home while I waited for my new place to be redecorated.
Thinking about how to present my content in a different language has been an interesting process, and in many ways a liberating one, and has given me a sense of starting over. At the same time, I can see a certain probability of ending up writing chiefly for myself, given that the cross over from my Spanish page seems to be scarce. Which is why my experience with Medium is prompting a rethink of my original idea: I can see the extent to which writing for a site like Medium is already giving me greater visibility than my own webpage does.
Medium is about content: aside from offering a wonderfully minimalist platform with just the right amount of formatting, as well as a notes threads that runs along the margin that you can keep private or make public, Medium’s structure is built around the concept of collections: my entries are published in my personal collection, but no small number of them have been added by other people to thematic collections where, on many occasions, they attract more readers. Furthermore, Medium allows for recommendations, which are another way to spread the word. In my case, during this month, I have been pleasantly surprised to see that two of my pieces made it into the Editor’s Picks, which has obviously increased their distribution notably.
And it is also the fact that Medium has an editor that makes the site so interesting as well. At the beginning of April, founder Ev Williams announced the appointment of a new content director, Kate Lee, who has been tasked with making sure that content flourishes by including articles in the appropriate collections, as well as by getting professional content providers to choose Medium as a competitively priced distribution channel. The acquisition of Matter, a poster child for the so called “slow journalism” born out of a Kickstarter project, is another step forward in the strategy to attract quality content.
So what is Medium’s strategy? Quite simply to create a forum for ideas, a place where it is pleasant and easy to write, and where talent can flourish free from short-term limitations, and through the use of simple algorithms based on the number of recommendations or the number of people who read content as opposed to simply opening it. When a reader accesses a collection, the order the content is seen is not chronological, but is based on recommendations. Similarly, when a reader accesses a writer, the entry that appears at the top of the page is not necessarily the most recent, but has been selected on the basis of its relevance, while the chronological order appears underneath. The author, sitting at his or her computer, can see the statistics showing the number of times an article has been accessed, read, the ratio between the two, the number of recommendations, as well, of course, being able to share the link via Twitter or Facebook.
A couple of final points: the feeling is, in many ways, is very similar to that we experienced in 2007 with Twitter: nobody talks about “business models”, nobody mentions how to finance Medium, but the company pays its bills and buys other companies on the basis of a strategy that makes sense and apparently without too many financial constraints. But given the credentials of the entrepreneurs behind the idea, that doesn’t seem likely to be too much of a problem…
