last highlighted date: 2022-07-16
Highlights
- Williams frequently spoke of his desire to make Medium a place for high-quality writing, one that elevated the national conversation. His annual appearances in the New York Times proclaiming that the internet was broken and that he intended to fix it, became a running gag among a certain set of media obsessives. (OK, maybe just me.) And yet by last year Williams was confronted by the fact that his revenues were being largely dictated by what performed well on search engines — the same business logic of the low-quality content farms of the late 2000s. It wasn’t a terrible business, exactly. But it wasn’t the business Williams had set out to build — nor was it the business he had hired for.
- On the high end, well funded digital publishers from BuzzFeed to Vice to the Atlantic excelled at publishing high-quality journalism. And on the low end, Substack emerged to let solo creators develop thriving, sustainable careers by offering individual subscriptions. (See my ethics disclosure about Substack.) In such a world, Medium had no obvious advantage. With its owned and operated publications gone, it became a general-interest web magazine staffed by freelancers and dependent on Google.