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

I think there's a large market of indie publishers who will continue to do well of their site & using things like medium.com as an outlet or satelite outreach. I think it's the newspapers that have bigger problems.

Also, it's a pet peeve of mine when they proclaim something is dead and then when pushed for details on how their service is going to solve it - they say "oh, don't worry, trust us."

For example, this exchange:

> Battelle: How am I going to make money on Medium?

> Williams: Not right now. We haven’t solved that problem quite yet. We will. We’re not going to invent some new way to make money from publishing. Will do turnkey premium-content option–with a paywall. We’ll also enable advertising. You can do branded/sponsored content on Medium, but there are no tools yet. We will have them, though.

Okay, so there's no way to make money off of Medium right now - got it.

Then, he immediately goes on to say:

> If you’re starting something today, within a year, you’ll make more money on Medium than you would publishing on your own.

Really? After you just told me that you can't make money on medium? I get that you need to paint the picture of the future where your product solves every little problem, but that seemed a little over the top.

And yes, I get it. Williams is much more successful than me and has done a lot more exits, but from his work, it seems like he's very good at building platforms, and infrastructure, but the monetization methods (for the users), isn't really there.

> Medium blends all of this in some uni-branded way and at the end of the day, people don't care about the publisher/brand anymore.

> Once the platform is even more crowded, the readers won't come themselves. You need to actively market your content and then the question is: Why would you market Medium's platform instead of your own?

I have read a number of things on medium, but to be honest, I couldn't remember who wrote most of them. The homogeneous design, while visually appealing and easy to read, means I rarely remember whose blog I was reading on medium. The lack of identity in the design seems like it would impede branding and marketing. Which then means it's going to be tough to make money, even if they add in paywall, advertising, etc.

The one thing I'd like Blendle to add, but maybe they did so already, is the ability to follow journalists. A number of my friends, for example, are freelancers and publish in multiple publications.