Why publishers are falling out of love with Medium
With all the recent coverage of Congress grilling tech executives for their alleged bias against conservatives, you can be forgiven if you didn’t hear about another mini-controversy brewing inside the world of social media platforms. Specifically, I’m referring to Medium’s decision to no longer let users register custom domains.
It used to be that a publisher could apply the Medium CMS to its own URL, just in the same way that I can build my website on top of Wordpress or Drupal. Under this system, unless a reader was familiar with the look and feel of a Medium article, they wouldn’t even know that a website was being powered by Medium.
But now publishers can no longer register these custom domains. If you want to host a new publication on Medium, it can only be found at medium.com/publication-name. Publications that were already using custom domains were grandfathered in and not affected by this policy change.
There have been dozens of tweets posted over the past 24 hours encouraging writers to get their content off Medium. “I would not recommend anyone to use Medium for a new publication without custom domain support,” wrote one user. “Medium has proven themselves an excessively volatile partner to publications already. Their whims will change again. You need an escape hatch.”
Weirdly enough, this isn’t actually a new policy. Medium announced the change back in November 2017. As best as I can tell, the announcement is only receiving renewed interest because of a recent Daring Fireball post encouraging users to abandon Medium as a publishing platform.
But Medium’s custom domains program is actually a holdover from back when it was building a business model centered around advertising revenue. Given its shift to a model that relies on paying subscribers, its abandonment of custom domains makes complete sense.
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To understand why Medium started allowing custom domains in the first place, one must travel back to 2016; the company partnered with about a dozen publishers, convincing them to move their entire operations onto its platform. The idea was to let these publishers do what they do best — create original content — while Medium did what Silicon Valley companies do best — maintain a best-of-class platform and state-of-the-art advertising tech. Medium would serve up beautiful native ads against publisher content and take a cut of the sales for its effort.
Except Medium CEO Ev Williams grew frustrated with this model from almost the moment it launched. In a post he published at the beginning of 2017, less than a year after partnering with these publications, he wrote that the incentives wrought by advertising were “driving the creation and spread of content” that was “not serving the people consuming it or creating it .” The ad products his team had created “were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming for.”
This post coincided with Medium laying off over a third of its staff, most of whom were connected in some way to this advertising model. The publishing partners were blindsided. “I did not think [Williams] would just pull the plug on publishing and start f — -ing people,” one anonymous publisher told Business Insider. One by one, these partners pulled out, migrating their publications to platforms like Wordpress. Bill Simmons’s The Ringer, one of Medium’s most high profile gets, abandoned it for Chorus, Vox Media’s custom CMS.
And within a few months, Williams was ready to announce his new business model: paid memberships. Subscribers would pay $5 a month, and for that they’d gain access to premium content.
This content would come from three different sources. The first was commissioned pieces from professional writers and journalists. Medium recruited Siobhan O’Connor, an executive editor at Time, to lead these efforts. It also syndicated article content from legacy publishers like The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic.
The third content source? Medium users themselves. Any user, before publishing, could designate their article for the platform’s membership program. They would then be paid based on an opaque, Spotify-like system that rewarded them for the amount of engagement their article received.
Williams has gone on record saying that he hopes to reach 10 million paying subscribers. That would require that Medium convert four times the number of subscribers as The New York Times, which currently maintains one of the world’s most successful digital subscription products. It remains to be seen whether the company will reach this goal, but at least some users have reported monthly earnings in the four figures, and Williams claims that the site is meeting its subscriber growth targets.
Which brings me back to the issue of custom domains. Having your own URL for your publication made sense when Medium was simply serving up advertising. But under a membership model, custom URLs make it nearly impossible to convert readers into paying subscribers. The average user isn’t going to understand that a publication with its own domain is hosted on the Medium platform, so trying to convert that reader into a paying subscriber for Medium is just going to confuse them.
This is the same reason that Netflix doesn’t licence its original shows to cable TV networks. The entire reason for creating the original content in the first place is to entice customers into signing up and paying for its service. Medium needs to become the centralized location on which all content, whether it’s premium or free, is published. Only then can it generate the network effects that will allow this model to scale.
In a way, Medium is cutting out the middlemen and funneling more money directly to the content creators themselves. In order to be a more welcoming place for writers, it had to abandon its aspirations to serve as a CMS platform for publishers. By eliminating custom domains, it wasn’t abandoning its core principles, it was embracing them.
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.
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