Medium's 2024 Message
A series of nice updates from Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine on the current state of the service ahead of their Medium Day event this year. Notably:
August is our first profitable month in the history of the company. We got here because more members are supporting us than ever before.
In April, we celebrated one million members. There’s a side story about how good engineering has saved us money on our server bills. But mostly it was as simple as making something members wanted to subscribe to.
This milestone is one thing that should be important to everyone here.
It’s that a better internet is possible. It’s not a fantasy. What we’re doing at Medium works.
While I shifted most of my writing over here at Spyglass (which is powered by Ghost),1 I have been slowly going back to republish some older posts again on Medium – namely because I continue to think it's ridiculous that nearly all the focus in publishing on the web is on what's new. If something is even a day old, there's this weird tension of "why are you sharing this?" – even if it's not at all related to timely events! Medium has always been better and more thoughtful about surfacing older content with the notion that it's no less good just because it was published yesterday or last week or last year.
They also, of course, have some network effects which are unique to Medium, something which Substack is trying to back into building, and Ghost is perhaps going to back into as well via what it's trying to do with Fediverse integration. Speaking of, back to Tony:
Last year I said that Twitter was dead. Well, it hasn’t died, even if it is dead to me. But I don’t feel healthy there.
What has happened is that there has been a large exodus to a number of places. We think writers who write on Medium often discuss what they’re writing in short form. Our interest is to help support that.
One way is with our Mastodon instance which gives you a hot at-me-dot-dm Mastodon username. (Mine is coachtony@me.dm.)
I think the fragmentation creates interesting options for people. I find the people on Mastodon to be the deepest thinkers and the most real. But I find Threads to be the best for self-promotion and sometimes, yes, I do have to play that game.
My Mastodon account is also run through Medium's instance and I do like the notion of using that "micro-blogging" service to have discussions about what's being written, as opposed to comment sections (though tying those into the Fediverse could eventually work in a way it was never able to on Twitter – too much out-of-context spam took over quickly).
Speaking of being spammy, I continue to be happy that Medium moved away from the ad-based model for publishing, which has largely made reading on the web a truly awful experience,2 and has now figured out a way to make that sustainable, it seems.
Mainly I'm just happy that Medium reverted to a logo that's more in line with their original thesis.
1 In part for features that Medium simply doesn't offer on the newsletter side, but also the notion of direct memberships versus communal ones -- just a different model!
2 Though yes, the service still has entirely too many pop-ups and banners to sign-in if you click on a link from elsewhere.