Why I’m Not Scared about the Direction Medium’s heading
Or rather, why I’m choosing not to be
Yesterday, Medium officially announced the expansion of its Partner Program to include more writers and publications, giving more people the opportunity to earn money off of “members-only” premium content.
As both a writer and a publication owner — a creator and consumer—here, I tend to keep my ear to the ground when it comes to platform updates, business model pivots, and the like, and I’ve seen a lot of mixed feelings in the past few months around this new direction Medium is heading.
First, The Bad News
Medium initially launched its membership feature 5 months ago to the day, amidst a slew of passive aggressive headlines and news articles. In all fairness, nobody really knew quite what to make of the move. It came just 2 months after news broke that Medium was laying off a third of its staff.
If that wasn’t bad enough, recently the focus has been more on key publications leaving Medium and moving their sites over to places like Wordpress, as one author pointed out just a few weeks ago.
And all you need to better understand why is Ev Williams’ 136-word reply to the above mentioned article:
Now, here we are. If you’re someone in my position — an up-and-coming entrepreneur who recently left a comfortable job to pursue growing his Medium publication full-time — it’s hard not to be at least a little bit frightened by all of this troublesome news.
But I’m not. Or rather, I’m choosing not to be. Here’s why.
Now, The Good News
A “mass exodus” of large publications from Medium doesn’t scare me, even if that is actually what is happening. For one thing, many of these publications follow an ad-based model because they have to. After all, they pay their staff, so their immediate need for revenue bypasses their ability to wait and see. And since Medium is openly against this “old” model, they really don’t have much of a reason to stick around while Medium tries to invent a new one.
This makes perfect sense to me and it’s good news solely because there will be less competition around for my publication, The Ascent. You could argue that it creates more competition away from Medium (because it does), but that remains to be seen.
Secondly, I believe in Medium’s current vision. Its initial rollout of some of these new features confused me just as it did most everybody, but now that they’re starting to paint a clearer picture, I’m liking what I see.
Trusting in the Vision
I recently wrote that through our work with The Ascent, our ultimate goal is to make a difference. Specifically, I said “We want to create a product that matters by helping other people create products that matter,” and I truly believe that we won’t get there by way of the old, ad-based model either.
As a writer and publication owner, it’s a way to make money; and in the short term, it makes sense for us to try and make money however we can, as quickly as we can. In the long term, however, it’s hardly something worth spending our time and energy on.
As you can no doubt tell, I am not from the publishing world. Ironically enough, I came from advertising. But, advertising is all about keeping up with — and even being ahead of — the current times, and banner advertising hasn’t been part of that picture for a very long time now.
And so, now that I see where Medium is heading, I have to admire their tenacity. It’s a long term vision; one that requires an extraordinary amount of patience. But, like I always tell the members of our community, you have to respect the process. The magic is all in the journey.
So, while others may be jumping ship, or casting doubt on another company’s dreams, we’ll be busy building our publication (our community), keeping our heads down, making ends meet however we can. We’re staying the course.
The Ascent isn’t going anywhere.
