Renewing Medium’s focus
If you check out all of the &quot;sponsored&quot; or &quot;partnership&quot; content on Medium, like:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theringer.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theringer.com&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electricliterature.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electricliterature.com&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-economist" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-economist</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@generalelectric" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@generalelectric</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@Starbucks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@Starbucks</a><p>You&#x27;ll notice the engagement is absolutely <i>terrible</i>. Between 10-100 likes, and even those stats are inflated by (no doubt terrified) Medium employees. Keep in mind, the rough &quot;like&quot; to &quot;view&quot; ratio is ~1:100, so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 views. Those are okay numbers when you&#x27;re paying your writer&#x2F;marketing guy $200 per post. Hardly the foundation for a company valued last year at $400M.<p>Of course, Medium could monetize with banner ads like every other site, and it does have enough traffic to do that (it&#x27;s the 371th most visited site in the world.) However, most writers only write on Medium <i>because</i> there aren&#x27;t any ads. If Medium suddenly started monetizing on my content &quot;YouTube style&quot; I would leave them for Wordpress in a second. The Medium community is fine (they&#x27;ll drive 100-1000 views per post on my pieces) but that&#x27;s not enough to justify graffitying my content with ads.<p>It seems like there&#x27;s a major identity crisis going on here. On one hand, a lot of great pieces are published on Medium.
(Perhaps not as many since Medium de-funded&#x2F;spun-out their flagship in-house publications, Matter and Backchannel). But there&#x27;s also a crazy amount of crap. The top stories on Medium are almost invariably listicles and trite &quot;How I Xed my Y in Z days&quot;.<p>I get the feeling Medium set out to position itself as a curated Wordpress (which might justify that gargantuan valuation) but these days it feels pretty much like an awkward, less popular, and slightly more erudite Buzzfeed.*<p>*Buzzfeed is not without its own problems. See traffic stats here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alexa.com&#x2F;siteinfo&#x2F;buzzfeed.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alexa.com&#x2F;siteinfo&#x2F;buzzfeed.com</a>