Perhaps yours does not come to mind when you think of the great names of founders and promoters of the current web, but Ev Williams has definitely done a lot for today’s internet; especially with regard to giving tools so that anyone could express themselves.
Williams was the founder of what ended up being first Blogger and then Blogspot, the well-known blogging platform that was bought by Google and that caused a fortune that Williams has been pulling later. He also tried to start Odeo, an experiment that ended up giving rise to Twitter, of which he was co-founder and second CEO. And lastly, Williams also founded Medium.
Medium was for a few years seen as a platform born to reverse the vices that the internet had taken from social networks. The return to a more careful blog and, incidentally, the reunion also on the part of the media with a context that was throwing them out at the time.
Medium wanted to be the place for creators, independent bloggers, but also for new digital media. It has tried a thousand options of formulas both to be profitable and to try to transfer monetization to its users.
This week, Ev Williams announced his departure from Medium, his object of desire in a way. And it does so by leaving a platform that has long been losing the war for being that new place that the creation of more or less independent content on the internet seemed to be looking for. Patreon, Substack, and even more massively Youtube or Twitch seem to have hit a nail that Medium didn’t even know were there.
With the departure of Ev Williams, the future of Medium is further compromised
Today there are surely people who wonder: Is Medium a network of blogs, a network of portals, a publication for blogging that tried to find direct money for writers, a CMS like WordPress…? Surely, he wanted to be everything and none of that at the same time.
Originally, Medium was conceived as a publication platform that sought to divide the difference between blogs and tweets.: medium-length posts, published occasionally rather than daily, that would seek to answer a question: “Now that we’ve made sharing information effortless,” Williams wrote in 2012, “how do we increase depth of understanding, by How long have we created a level playing field that encourages ideas from everywhere?”
This week, a month after 10 years of mostly unsuccessful attempts to answer that question, Williams gave up. At the moment he has not made any statements.
Own New York Times It stated that “Medium refused to make Mr. Williams available for an interview. Evan Williams said in his message that he was leaving Medium because “change and renewal are healthy,” noting that August will be his 10th anniversary as CEO.”
The only thing he exposed in a statement was that “to be clear, the story of Medium is far from over,” Williams wrote. Something that few people seem to trust.
Medium said Williams would step down as CEO effective July 20 and be replaced by Tony Stubblebine., CEO of the online coaching company Coach.me. Williams will become chairman of Medium’s board of directors, a new role.
Williams said he would remain chairman of the board, but would also start a “new holding company/research lab” to work on other projects.
Medium had already been making many changes of course, possibly because it was not right with any of them. This same year he announced layoffs and the closure of several of his own headers that he had created under the subscription model, with which he tried a thousand and one ways.
And that apparently was not going badly. It had started the year 2021 with some 700,000 paid subscriptions, the majority in the United States, since it never got to test a good part of its monetization options outside its original market. That meant it was on track to earn $35 million in revenue from its $5 monthly subscription offer.
The idea of Medium was not working as intended
At the same time, internal data showed that, to a large extent, it wasn’t high-quality journalism that drove readers to subscribe: it was random stories posted on the platform by freelance writers that happened to be highlighted by Google’s algorithms or Facebook. It was not the model they had originally proposed.
Williams saw how the success of his platform depended on social networks or searches on Google or Google Discover: the very business logic you were wanting to change.
Nor is it that it made it easy to monetize or had a simple model. As we said, over the last decade, few have matched him in terms of the number of changes of address he inflicted on investors, users and employees.
The rise of Medium – while collecting investment rounds that were not too important compared to other companies but were big for the media industry – coincided in 2015, the moment in which Barack Obama began publishing on the platform. Today the profile of the president of the United States is still active, with the Executive of Joe Biden taking it up again in recent months. But in just this five years, a curious anecdote illustrates the direction that the company has taken.
In NiemanLabonce collected all the monetization models they tested:
- Pay freelancers to curate story collections and pay them per click (2013).
- The same but paying for the time people spend reading them (2014).
- Hire full-time journalists to create your own publications
- Post ads as sponsored content, starting with BMW (2014).
- Host third-party publications, such as TheRinger either out of series in Spain, on your own custom domains.
- In 2017 it closed the advertising model completely
- A $5 subscription to read everything on Medium (2017).
And we have reduced many…
Surely, unlike Patreon or Subsatck, which have managed to occupy that space between independent creators and the audiencebut not denying networks or recruitment channels, but relying on them, Medium has wanted to be something that still seems to have no place in today’s internet.