Because medium was a blogging platform just like all of the others that didnt add much over what writers on the platform wrote and relied on link aggregators to drive traffic.
Surprise surprise subscriptions added to much friction and people stopped linking so the conversation moved elsewhere.
Medium started off as a no-BS blog platform with a snappy reader experience and ended as the total opposite of that. Many digital products face the same fate once they're forced to monetize.
Medium’s failure was rather simple. Medium put paywalls in front of blogs. Blogs were supposed to be an open medium. I don’t think anybody really wanted that.
It's a different time. Substack has quite a big creator audience of outrage merchants that monetize writing things you're (allegedly) "not allowed to say", to an audience that happily pays to keep their favourites engaged in the shovelware equivalent of culture war opinion pieces.
I'm sure you can think of one no matter your political affiliation.
That sounds like a strategy that will work for a time. I remember 7-8 years ago, when Medium was putatively accruing all the good content, and then gradually paywalling it. Subscriptions don't seem to work for most sites, so I'm anticipating Substack undergoing a slow death like Medium.
Substack is monetizing newsletters which are somewhat different than the traditional blog. Blogs are more informal with no commitment to publishing frequency. Blogs have no barrier to entry and are monetized via an advertising model.
Monetizing a blog with a paywall is dumb, because it increases the friction of people reading your content. Usually you blog to build a profile, which you can't do if you erect barriers to your audience.
Monetizing newsletters makes more sense because you already know who and what you are paying for. Substack poached high profile journalists and bloggers to write newsletters for their platform. They paid upfront. That said, I don't know if Substack is making enough revenue to survive long term. They only made $9M on a $650M valuation last year. There seems to be increasing burnout with news engagement these days due to years of outrage and disappointment.
There used to be some good content on Medium because it had a fantastic editing/publishing experience and discoverability was good.
> Medium, a publishing platform that sought to split the difference between blogs and tweets: medium-length posts, [...]
For me, I think it failed because we end up with shallow posts that split the difference between a tweet and a blog. Monetization/paywalls may have accelerated it.
It's the same as anything else, once you remove all the barriers to entry most of the content is trash. The value of any content platform is being able to surface quality relevant content. Medium doesn't have any mechanisms for this so isn't better than anything else.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 40.5 ms ] threadSurprise surprise subscriptions added to much friction and people stopped linking so the conversation moved elsewhere.
Medium failed because their execution was poor.
I'm sure you can think of one no matter your political affiliation.
Monetizing a blog with a paywall is dumb, because it increases the friction of people reading your content. Usually you blog to build a profile, which you can't do if you erect barriers to your audience.
Monetizing newsletters makes more sense because you already know who and what you are paying for. Substack poached high profile journalists and bloggers to write newsletters for their platform. They paid upfront. That said, I don't know if Substack is making enough revenue to survive long term. They only made $9M on a $650M valuation last year. There seems to be increasing burnout with news engagement these days due to years of outrage and disappointment.
> Medium, a publishing platform that sought to split the difference between blogs and tweets: medium-length posts, [...]
For me, I think it failed because we end up with shallow posts that split the difference between a tweet and a blog. Monetization/paywalls may have accelerated it.
It's the same as anything else, once you remove all the barriers to entry most of the content is trash. The value of any content platform is being able to surface quality relevant content. Medium doesn't have any mechanisms for this so isn't better than anything else.