Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast • Hacker News Board

Re: Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast

#21

Post by ericschmidt » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

WA wrote: post #3

Q: How am I going to make money on Medium? A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising. So what's the benefit of Medium over the website of my newspaper, where the newspaper has 100% control of the appearance, content, advertisers, additional revenue streams and so on? Furthermore: I don't read that many magazin…

>The last time you bought something on eBay or Aamzon Marketplace, do you know the actual shop's name within the marketplace? Probably not. This is not desirable for publishers and thus, I don't believe that Medium will be the future.

I agree.

As Ev enters the b2b space, he is making some crucial mistakes RE: understanding the psychology of his customers.

* Businesses don't want to be anonymous (and being on Medium, no matter what, increases their anonymity, simply because of the "uni-branding" that you mention) * People don't want to buy from anonymous businesses.

People like identity. They like to identify with things. They like to personify things, to "humanize" them, to project themselves onto other objects and understand them that way.

Medium has no identity. Medium's value is about its lack of identity. That's not necessarily a bad thing: Facebook's value is its lack of identity too.

But Facebook and Medium have different customers, and their customers have different desires when it comes to managing their identities.

Facebook's content-producers are primarily PEOPLE.

Medium's content-producers are primarily ORGANIZATIONS.

And while PEOPLE are fine being "uni-branded," ORGANIZATIONS fuckin despise it.

Evan Williams doesn't understand the psychology of his customers.

After reading this, I would not invest in Medium.

Re: Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast

#22

Post by ksk » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #15

WA wrote: post #3

Q: How am I going to make money on Medium? A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising. So what's the benefit of Medium over the website of my newspaper, where the newspaper has 100% control of the appearance, content, advertisers, additional revenue streams and so on? Furthermore: I don't read that many magazin…

> We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. So, Williams starts off at Blogger, which hasn't solved the problem of making money for content creators yet, really. To be fair to it, nor has Tumblr or Wordpress. Then he moves to Odeo, a pdocasting company, which fails to solve the monetization problem for podcast creators so hard that it pivots into enterprise video library SaaS solutions. Then he moves to Twitter, whic…

Indeed. Money comes later as a business model has not been the most statistically successful model. ;)

Re: Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast

#23

Post by ThomPete » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 11:47 PM UTC

WA wrote: post #3

Q: How am I going to make money on Medium? A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising. So what's the benefit of Medium over the website of my newspaper, where the newspaper has 100% control of the appearance, content, advertisers, additional revenue streams and so on? Furthermore: I don't read that many magazin…

I am always reminded of Clayton Christensens very simple principle. Be patient for growth not for profit.

And it taps into a discussion I had with another friend of mine who is a founder of a venture backed company.

His claim was that he wanted to create a workplace that wasn't like those old industries which exploited it's workers.

My claim was that the only reason he could even care about that was because he was backed. The second you actually have to make a profit and there is no potential investor waiting to bail you out lets see how nice you are going to be.

In other words. It's easy to want to change the world and do things different when you don't have to create profit but just grow. It's when you have to make a profit every single day the true nature of your business become apparent.

Re: Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast

#24

Post by carterehsmith » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 1:48 AM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #15

WA wrote: post #3

Q: How am I going to make money on Medium? A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising. So what's the benefit of Medium over the website of my newspaper, where the newspaper has 100% control of the appearance, content, advertisers, additional revenue streams and so on? Furthermore: I don't read that many magazin…

> We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. So, Williams starts off at Blogger, which hasn't solved the problem of making money for content creators yet, really. To be fair to it, nor has Tumblr or Wordpress. Then he moves to Odeo, a pdocasting company, which fails to solve the monetization problem for podcast creators so hard that it pivots into enterprise video library SaaS solutions. Then he moves to Twitter, whic…

But Medium has parallax scrolling and "social integration" features that will disrupt the news business, and perhaps all of our world later. Checkmate, dude?

Re: Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast

#25

Post by drannex » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 3:23 AM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #15

WA wrote: post #3

Q: How am I going to make money on Medium? A: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. [...] Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising. So what's the benefit of Medium over the website of my newspaper, where the newspaper has 100% control of the appearance, content, advertisers, additional revenue streams and so on? Furthermore: I don't read that many magazin…

> We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. So, Williams starts off at Blogger, which hasn't solved the problem of making money for content creators yet, really. To be fair to it, nor has Tumblr or Wordpress. Then he moves to Odeo, a pdocasting company, which fails to solve the monetization problem for podcast creators so hard that it pivots into enterprise video library SaaS solutions. Then he moves to Twitter, whic…

I would like to say Tumblr does allow content creators to make money, I make a good 600-1200 extra a month off of tumblr due to sponsorship posts and advertisements on the actual blogs (google ads)