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Inside Medium's Meltdown

businessinsider.com

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Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#81

Post by idiot_stick »

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…

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

Twitter has a celebrity SV CEO. That's his job; what are they waiting for?

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#82

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

avocade wrote: post #72

The usual sensationalistic headline, but the gist of the story is crystal clear: ads and writing is an inherent and probably impossible-to-solve conflict of interest. The media that won't change their business model during the next couple of years will probably be extremely diminished in quality, and thus influence. Can't wait. (And no, the latest fad of "native advertising", with ads disguising as articles, is not t…

Ads + Writing worked just fine for most of the last century when print was the only option.

The dead elephant in the room is the fact that the online ad experience is the most irritating and least useful ad experience in all of history.

I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing.

The ads are completely useless to me, because I'm no longer interested in buying A Certain Thing. The ads are useless for the advertiser, because they're paying for nothing. And the ads themselves are usually animated and irritating anyway.

Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.

The online ad industry has never understood the difference between adding value to readers and repeatedly smacking them around the head in a misguided attempt to force them to click the BUY NOW button.

Medium missed the point of all this. The content varies from outstanding to not so good, the design is great. But it's a bit late to be thinking about monetisation, because now it's just replaying the mistakes made by every other media platform over the last decade and a half.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#83

Post by idiot_stick »

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.

>billionaire CEO Ev Williams

The fact that you can become a billionaire after founding two money losing enterprises is so confusing.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#84

Post by dilemma »

dpweb wrote: post #38
dilemma wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would if they then syndicated the posts to publications around the world. German newspapers and magazines, for example, could have their pick of prominent writers they otherwise would not have access to and couldn't afford.

No sharing. Prominent people's opinions in Medium articles would make news and drive people to Medium content. "Colin Powell calls Trumps immigration policy misguided". That's a global headline. Traffic rules. Everyone tries to think like a VC. Medium will never be the biggest money. What they can do is be the next '60 Minutes', not the biggest, but prestigous and elevating.

Having Powells weekly column is more valuable and provides something you can plan around and build a business model around. You can't do that with social media snippets.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#85

Post by dilemma »

ThomPete wrote: post #39
dilemma wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would if they then syndicated the posts to publications around the world. German newspapers and magazines, for example, could have their pick of prominent writers they otherwise would not have access to and couldn't afford.

No, its not the quality of the content which makes it a business, this is exactly the misunderstanding of the whole mission to save journalism. Its never been a business to begin with.

I never mentioned quality. Prominent writers.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#86

Post by sah2ed »

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"

Mind providing a source for that quote?

Both Google and Bing link to your comment as the canonical source for that quote from Barksdale.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#87

Post by ddebernardy »

ThomPete wrote: post #9

I think the problem with journalism is that it was never the actual business. What it was, were supporting and adding sophistication to the news industry, but it was never actually central to the business. But the value of news was that it didnt used to be widely available. That was actually what people paid for. The news, not the journalism. And so what we see are all these people in the news industry trying to impr…

Distribution was also key in the demise. The business model for decades, explained in one of Buffet's shareholder letters, was to become an area's key source of news: Once you're the last newspaper in town, you get to milk the area. That flew out the window when internet came along.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#88

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

anamoulous wrote: post #52
whack wrote: post #3

Personally, I respect Ev more for his decision to put on the brakes, even when Medium seemed to be a financial success. We already have enough blogging platforms. We really don't need yet another one. Ev Williams' mission to change the way journalism is funded and operated though, that's a truly noble ideal. Yes, it's likely too ambitious to succeed. Yes, it's a moonshot. But it's exactly the kind of moonshot that Si…

If this comment is satire it is very good.

Glad I'm not the only one. All I could picture was Gavin Belson on stage at TC Disrupt while I was reading this...

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#89

Post by mgkimsal »

boozywoozy wrote: post #74
navs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He could have done that with a lot more tact - informing publishers and employees. He's non-confrontational - ok. Hire someone that isn't. Moonshots carry a risk and it's not all his risk. It's the investors, the users, the employees as well.

Well said. Hindsight is 20-20 though. I imagine it's not easy to make the right calls when one is in the driver's seat. My takeaway: It's freaking hard to be CEO.

Letting employees know they're getting laid off before they read about it somewhere else isn't really one of the great mysteries of life, and doesn't take decades of CEO/executive experience to figure out. It's sort of a basic human decency thing. It shouldn't be that hard to be a decent human being.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#90

Post by bunelr »

tnecniv wrote: post #40
epberry wrote: post #11

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 t…

Do you have a link to the ILP one?

I imagine it is that one: https://blog.remix.com/an-intro-to-integer-programming-for-e...
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