Did Medium Succeed?

Yesterday Ev Williams stepped aside as the CEO of Medium, ten years after he founded the company.

Pundits’ reaction to this news ranged from muted to harsh. The media narrative around Medium turned bad over the past decade as the company repeatedly changed strategies, often impacting employees and users along the way.

This week we may have seen the climax of that narrative—in the form of the most brutal headline I have read in quite a long time:

“Ev Williams gives up” is how Casey Newton put it, thereby renouncing his right to ever go back to traditional media and quit writing his Substack newsletter 😅

Casey’s post is a classic retelling of the conventional version of the Medium story: they pivoted too much and screwed over writers, they raised too much money, and they failed to achieve their overly-ambitious goal of fixing the media. This story gets a lot right, but the full truth is more interesting and complicated. It’s worth taking seriously by anyone who wants to know how traditional publishers and open platforms collide, why so many well-intentioned efforts to “save media” seem to end in disappointment, and what comes next for writers and readers on the internet.

I don’t have any inside information on Medium, but I have been a close observer and user since the very beginning, and I was an early employee of their main rival, Substack. So I figured now is a good occasion to write up the Medium story from my point of view.

To begin, let’s go back to the beginning.

Medium was created to solve discovery

In August of 2012 Ev published a post introducing Medium to the world. In it, he pitched writers three reasons to use Medium: 

1. Focused writing experience
2. Collaboration tools (e.g. Google Docs style comments)
3. Distribution of your writing to new readers via curation and algorithms

The first reason, the writing UX, is a classic example of a product wedge. Come for the tool, stay for the network. Even if nobody you know uses Medium, you might want to publish there for the focused writing experience and overall high-quality design.

But this feature alone would be easy to copy. Which is where the next two selling points come in. By building a commenting system, they created a reason for writers to share Medium drafts with friends, pulling them into the network. And by offering distribution to new readers, it creates a potential network effect, where more readers lead to more writers, and more writers lead to more readers. 

To many writers, Medium felt back then kind of like TikTok and YouTube probably felt to video creators when they were getting started. It’s hard to overstate just how exciting and new this was in 2012. I still remember how pumped I was when I managed to get a beta invite. My first post was seen by thousands of people. I had no idea how or why that happened (I think it got featured?) but I loved it.

No way was I going back to Wordpress.

It worked!*

Over the next few years, millions of people read stories on Medium, published by hundreds of thousands of writers. They were able to attract pretty much every famous person and organization imaginable, up to and including the President of the United States.

I think a lot of this was due to one main reason, which wasn’t explicit in the original pitch: you could publish a post without starting a blog.

This made Medium the ideal place for people who had something to say but didn’t want to create an ongoing commitment. Great! There was just one problem (hence the asterisk in this section’s title): this feature was also where Medium got the reputation as the “PR dumping ground” of the internet. Anytime anybody wanted to promote anything, they’d post to Medium about it.

Lots of people posted to Medium and tweeted a link, or saw a link and clicked, but far fewer people followed writers or turned to Medium’s feed to decide what to read. Of course there were still hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who did this. But the growth of that type of user was much slower than the big social networks, and the amount of time they spent each week “engaging with content” was much lower on average, I am fairly certain. So it probably wasn’t looking to Ev and the team like they could aggregate enough attention to just slap on an advertising network and call it a business.

To make matters worse, there started to be growing signs of a quality problem. This isn’t an issue unique to Medium, but low-brow writing tended to perform frustratingly well. The same way people groan about cringey self-help threads on Twitter now, people griped about self-help Medium posts back then.

According to an article published in 2015, the top ten Medium posts of all time were:

1. Welcome to Medium
2. The 37 Best Websites To Learn Something New
3. How quitting my corporate job for my startup dream f*cked my life up
4. 8 Things Every Person Should Do Before 8 A.M.
5. 7 Things You Need To Stop Doing To Be More Productive, Backed By Science
6. 33 Websites That Will Make You a Genius
7. HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT IN 4 EASY STEPS
8. Advice from 30 year old me to 20 year old me
9. The Crossroads of Should and Must
10. 7 Rejections