Your name may not come to mind when you think of the great names of the founders and promoters of the modern web, but Ev Williams has definitely done a lot for the modern internet.; especially in regards to providing tools so that everyone can express themselves.
Williams was the founder of what would eventually become first Blogger and then Blogspot, a well-known blogging platform that was bought by Google and made a fortune that Williams was throwing money at. He also tried to launch Odeo, the experiment that gave rise to Twitter, of which he co-founded and co-CEO. And finally, Williams also founded Medium.
For several years, Medium has been seen as a platform designed to reverse the evils that the Internet has borrowed from social media.. A return to a more cautious blog and, by the way, a reunion also by the media with the context that threw them away at the time.
Medium wanted to be a place for writers, independent bloggers, and new digital media. He tried a thousand variations of formulas both to make a profit and to try to pass on the monetization to his users.
This week, Ev Williams announces his departure from Medium, his object of desire is on the way. And it does this by leaving a platform that has long been losing the war for being that new place that seemed to be looking to create more or less independent content online. Patreon, Substack and even Youtube or Twitch seem to hit a point that Medium didn’t even know existed.
With the departure of Ev Williams, the future of Medium is in jeopardy.
There are certainly people today who are wondering: is Medium a blogging network, a portal network, a blogging publication that was trying to find direct money for writers, a CMS like WordPress…? Of course, he wanted to be all and none of this at the same time.
Medium was originally conceived as a publishing platform that sought to separate the difference between blogs and tweets.: medium-length posts published on an occasional rather than daily basis to answer the question: “Now that we have simplified the exchange of information,” Williams wrote in 2012, “how can we increase the depth of understanding of how much we have created equal game conditions that encourage ideas from everywhere?”
This week, a month after 10 years of largely unsuccessful attempts to answer that question, Williams gave in. At the moment, he has not made any statements.
Own The newspaper “New York Times It stated that “Medium refused to grant an interview to Mr. Williams. Evan Williams said in a post that he is leaving Medium because “the changes and updates are useful,” noting that he will be 10 years old as CEO in August.
The only thing he revealed in his statement is that “To be clear, the story of Medium is far from over,” Williams wrote, in a move that few seem to trust.
Medium reported that Williams will step down as CEO effective July 20 and will be replaced by Tony Stubblebine., CEO of online coaching company Coach.me. Williams will become chairman of the board of directors of Medium, a new role.
Williams said he would remain chairman of the board, but would also create a “new holding company/research lab” to work on other projects.
Of course, Medium has already made many changes, perhaps because none of them fit. In the same year, he announced layoffs and the closure of several of his own titles, which he created on a subscription model with which he tried a thousand and one ways.
And it didn’t seem to go so badly. It started 2021 with roughly 700,000 paid subscriptions, most of them in the United States, as it never got to test much of its monetization options outside of its original market. This meant that he was on track to generate $35 million in revenue from a $5 monthly subscription.
The Medium idea didn’t work as intended
At the same time, internal data showed that largely low-quality journalism encouraged readers to subscribe: these were random stories posted on the platform by freelance writers that were randomly highlighted by Google or Facebook algorithms. . It was not the model they originally offered.
Williams saw how the success of his platform depended on social media or search queries on Google or Google Discover: the same business logic that you wanted to change.
And it’s not that it was easy to monetize or that it had a simple model. As we have said, over the past decade, few have matched him in terms of the number of address changes he has inflicted on investors, users, and employees.
Medium’s rise – in raising investment rounds that were not too important compared to other companies, but were of great importance for the media industry – coincided with 2015, when Barack Obama began publishing on the platform. Today, the profile of the President of the United States is still active and has been taken over again by Chief Executive Joe Biden in recent months. But in just those five years, a curious anecdote illustrates the direction the company is headed.
Nieman Lab once collected all the monetization models they tested:
- Pay freelancers to create storybooks and pay them per click (2013).
- The same, but with payment for the time people spend reading them (2014).
- Hire in-house journalists to create your own publications
- Advertise as sponsored content starting with BMW (2014).
- Hosting third-party publications such as ringer or out of series in Spain, on your own domains.
- Completely closed the advertising model in 2017
- $5 subscription to read everything on Medium (2017).
And we have reduced many…
Of course, unlike Patreon or Subsatck, who managed to fill that space between independent creators and the audience.but rather than denying networks or recruitment channels, Medium wanted to be something that still seems to have no place on today’s Internet.
Source: Hiper Textual
