What's next for Medium?

ALSO: Let's argue about standardisation and innovation!

I want to write something about Medium.com. Medium is a website that, more than any other in recent years, set out to change modern journalism. That’s not me suggesting that it has succeeded, but that codified into its ethos was a belief that a new ecosystem could arise.

Created back in 2012 by Ev Williams, a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Medium’s mission was simple enough. At Twitter, users were confined to a very limited character count (a character count limitation that was essential to what the product was). With Medium, creators would have more space – not to write New Yorker or Atlantic style essays, but to self-publish ‘medium’ length blogs. Medium would handle many of the things that bloggers at that point were finding restrictive to success, namely a very easy-to-use CMS, an elegant and unified design, and an internal curation mechanism that gave anyone a puncher’s chance of success.

Why am I talking about Medium now? Well, this past week, its CEO and founder, Ev Williams, announced that he would step aside after a decade running the company. This was after, it’s fair to say, a not insignificant amount of scrutiny on the company’s direction, following a series of pivots and realignments (two great, jargonistic words for slightly changing your business plan). The bigger issues had emerged as Medium began to focus on publications, hiring editors and journalists, moving from advertising to subscriptions, and trying to be less of an unregulated wilderness and more of a sophisticated multi-publication publisher. The issue this created was that, from 2015, the company began layoffs amongst its editorial staff – and if there’s one way to guarantee bad press, it’s to sack journalists. “To be clear, Medium’s story is far from over,” Williams wrote in his farewell, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of commentators weighing in.

Perhaps the most damning judgment on Medium’s past (and future) came from tech blogger Casey Newton (who writes the Platformer newsletter on Medium’s biggest rival, Substack). “[A]fter ten long years, there is very little that Medium hasn’t already tried,” he wrote. “It was always grandiose to suggest that a humble blogging platform could fix the internet. Now Williams has kicked himself upstairs, and it will be up to someone else to try to fix his company.”

Now, as many readers of this Substack will know, I’ve been blogging regularly on Medium for the past few years, predominantly about the podcast industry. I now have 22,000 followers on the platform, which puts me in a relatively elite tier (especially amongst people who are not just spouting aspirational nonsense about having a terrible work/life balance). I don’t truly understand why my profile has risen on Medium so much, especially in the past 12 months (and I suspect that a lot of my followers are actually bots) but, for various reasons, it’s a site that I have a lot of affection for. Perhaps it’s the gambler’s fallacy – I’ve spent enough time on Medium to trick my brain into thinking it’s good – but I feel like, in the low-key depressed world of new media, it has always had a democratic, pluralistic ethos that’s genuinely rare.

I first started writing on Medium after a work meeting at an art gallery with a slightly head-in-clouds film producer. He said that I should consider writing on Medium – to which I replied “well yeah, I’d love to…” I mistakenly thought, at that point, that Medium was something like Slate or Vulture – one of those fancy mononymous American publications that pay $600 for a 500 word blog. This is because I had only seen Medium out the corner of my eye, and it looked slick ­­– far more like the New York Times than Blogspot.

Obviously that was dumb of me, and I did realise my mistake (hence me having written, at time of writing, 124 articles on my Medium blog). One of the biggest issues that Medium’s had over the years – and the reason they introduced publications and editors – is the concentration of low-quality content, the sort-of sub-LinkedIn guff about productivity hacks and interview technique. Like The Game but for networking. And the reason I started to gain some traction on Medium was similar: I wrote a series of visual histories of Trump magazine covers that were, even for a little bit of commentary, essentially just compilations of other people’s work. I just put it all together, and people ate that shit up – tens of thousands of people have read those blogs.

Pretty quickly I pivoted (hey, I’m doing it too!) away from politics and towards podcasting and media analysis. Raw audience figures or even ‘claps’ (Medium’s subscriber-only free tip offer) didn’t really matter to me. While I am enrolled in the partner programme, and made some money from it in the early days, a change to Medium’s rules meant I could no longer simply pay UK income tax on my earnings. At that point, it ceased to be worthwhile as an undertaking for me. But I remain part of the partner programme and paywall the majority of my articles because, in my experience, those pieces perform better. But the real financial return to writing all these 100+ blogs on Medium, has been a thought leadership opportunity (or, if not leadership, a jostling position in the midst of the peloton).

For this, Medium is still essential. And let’s not forget that Medium’s greatest success, perhaps, has been becoming the default publication (although it is, of course, a platform, not a publication) for politicians and public figures, from American presidents to some of the world’s richest people, to issue statements, reflections, condolences and recommendations. Many serious publications, such as The Atlantic, syndicate some of their content through Medium. In between all the half-baked fluff about “You Can Quit Your Job And Join The NBA in JUST SIX MONTHS!”, there’s some great writing being produced. And there’s all my stuff, too!