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Inside Medium's Meltdown

businessinsider.com

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Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#11

Post by epberry »

I'm guessing I read several Medium articles a month. Some of them are really well produced - Transit's engineering post on beautifying their maps, Remix's post about public transportation planning and ILP, and Karpathy's post on backprop come to mind. So I hope Medium sticks around because I get a lot of value out of them. Would I pay for this value? I think I actually would, but maybe only for stories I finish and think are good. For example I would pay a lot for the stories above but I would almost rather Medium pay me for posts which turn out to be thinly veiled marketing that I stop reading halfway through (I realize Transit's and Remix's posts could be construed as such but hey, the technical content was deep). I suppose a flat fee is better for the business but I could be more convinced to plunk down the credit card at the beginning if I was charged based on usage, like time spent reading on the site.

Also, let me just take a moment to once again rage against Business Insider for writing a pretty bad article. The whole thing seemed purposefully antagonistic and full of sarcastic language. Maybe it's because BI is the exact type of operation Medium is trying to kill, but I think those MAU numbers actually warrant some optimism! To be fair, Medium probably should have provided some people to counterbalance all those angry publishers...

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#12

Post by x0x0 »

bigtunacan wrote: post #6

From the article, "industry insiders have growing doubts about Williams' business judgment and are starting to say the company is his vanity project" This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still a vanity project.

The difference with twitter is they could fire their way to profitability.

2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing $.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B).

Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable.

2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and financials available: https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm

edit: thanks @mastazi

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#13

Post by jfoutz »

dboreham wrote: post #8
coldtea wrote: post #2

> They were shocked. Their adored boss, billionaire CEO Ev Williams, best known as the cofounder of Twitter, seemed to care so deeply for each of them. LOL, as if CEOs (with the exception of some outliers in small businesses) ever care for their employees at the personal level. As soon as the company is in danger, it's off they go. And when the company does well, they aren't going to share the loot that much either.

Jim Barksdale : "I'm not your Daddy and this isn't a family"

I've worked at a few small to medium sized businesses that went through layoffs. At that scale, you can corner the CEO and ask them about it (i only asked years after the event).

There's no easy way out. I'm sure the big guys are all run by sociopaths, but the few i talked to really struggled with it. It really boils down to, some people are out of a job today, or everyone is out of a job in 6 months.

This also includes the early detection of impending doom where everybody takes a 10% paycut - executives take a lot more (for a while anyway). So you can get away without a layoff. That guy felt the business would have been better if he let 10% go. The one time event can start healing immediately. That twice a month reminder of how much less you're making keeps the wound open a lot longer.

I've never met one who didn't (effectively) say "I failed and those folks paid the price"

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#14

Post by dpweb »

I view Medium not like a news or blog, but at its best - like the OpEd page of a major newspaper. Medium destroys the average newspaper website experience - ad crazy garbage everywhere.

They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles.

For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some powerful figures like that - retired, out of political offce. Meanwhile they should be also finding the young important voices of the future, who can be had cheap at this point.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#15

Post by whorleater »

Thaxll wrote: post #5

I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress? I still don't understand how very simple business like that can raise hundred of millions...

> I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress

Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a company that claims to displace Wordpress it's not unthinkable for it to raise hundreds of millions.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#16

Post by mastazi »

x0x0 wrote: post #12
bigtunacan wrote: post #6

From the article, "industry insiders have growing doubts about Williams' business judgment and are starting to say the company is his vanity project" This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still a vanity project.

The difference with twitter is they could fire their way to profitability. 2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing $.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B). Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable. 2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and financials available: https://investor.twitterinc.com/resu…

> loss from operations ($367B)

I think (and hope) that you missed a dot there :-)

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#17

Post by bigtunacan »

x0x0 wrote: post #12
bigtunacan wrote: post #6

From the article, "industry insiders have growing doubts about Williams' business judgment and are starting to say the company is his vanity project" This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still a vanity project.

The difference with twitter is they could fire their way to profitability. 2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing $.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B). Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable. 2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and financials available: https://investor.twitterinc.com/resu…

While the scale is different I don't see that the underlying issue is.

What you are suggesting about making Twitter profitable (which I happen to agree with) seems to be what they are attempting to do at Medium with these layoffs.

An aside on the Twitter front though; at this point I'm not sure cost slashing is going to help their stock prices at this point even if they turn a profit as they are already showing declining revenues.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#18

Post by x0x0 »

bigtunacan wrote: post #17
x0x0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference with twitter is they could fire their way to profitability. 2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing $.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B). Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable. 2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and financials available: https://investor.twitterinc.com/resu…

While the scale is different I don't see that the underlying issue is. What you are suggesting about making Twitter profitable (which I happen to agree with) seems to be what they are attempting to do at Medium with these layoffs. An aside on the Twitter front though; at this point I'm not sure cost slashing is going to help their stock prices at this point even if they turn a profit as they are already showing decli…

A prerequisite to the cut-your-way-to-profitability plan is income. There's no evidence Medium had much income.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#19

Post by bigtunacan »

x0x0 wrote: post #18
bigtunacan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the scale is different I don't see that the underlying issue is. What you are suggesting about making Twitter profitable (which I happen to agree with) seems to be what they are attempting to do at Medium with these layoffs. An aside on the Twitter front though; at this point I'm not sure cost slashing is going to help their stock prices at this point even if they turn a profit as they are already showing decli…

A prerequisite to the cut-your-way-to-profitability plan is income. There's no evidence Medium had much income.

Can you provide evidence there is no income? They aren't a publicly traded company so I haven't seen their earnings reports...

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#20

Post by gvb »

Thaxll wrote: post #5

I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress? I still don't understand how very simple business like that can raise hundred of millions...

Medium is all about the content on the web site "medium.com".

Wordpress is software that displays a web site's content.

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