I agree that it feels like Medium failed, but I think it's hard to say exactly why because it's hard to say exactly what Medium failed at.
Several iterations of their (often changing) business model seemed to focus around creating a high-prestige magazine (or close equivalent). And for a period of time, it seemed to be working; the Medium domain was often a sign that I was going to read something interesting and insightful, to the extent that I would be more likely to follow a link to Medium than to a domain I didn't recognise.
But launching a magazine is expensive; it requires money for high quality content, and money to pay for the editorial staff to run it. (And although I don't think Medium suffered from this especially, when that editorial staff makes editorial decisions, you run the risk of being sucket into the culture war, and the moment you deeply offend a large fraction of your audience because you censored/refused to censor Topic X, your economics suddenly get much much worse.)
And as a host of existing magazines have found out recently, there's no money in running a magazine anyhow, which I imagine explains why the quality of Medium content fell off a cliff, even as they started more and more aggressively trying to monetize things.
Adding to that, the UI was passable to start with, but actively deteriorated under their monetization efforts. At certain times, arriving at an article hosted on Medium with a small screensize could result in your browser being overwhelmingly filled with Medium UI, with little or no actual content visible.
If the content isn't reliably good, and the UX is reliably bad, what's left?
> Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well?
I think there is, it's just fantastically hard. If you look around, there are a small handful of newspapers, magazines, etc. that are still suceeding, putting out content while paying the bills. So it's like asking "can my home town paper be economically viable?" On the one hand, yes, the NYT has done it, so your local paper can too! On the other hand, 99% of newspapers are disasterous failures, and your local paper probably isn't going to be the NYT.
It's worth underlining the incredible ambition of what Medium wanted to do (in most of their business models anyhow). Failure wasn't inevitable, but it wasn't surprising.
(Also, the constant pivoting probably didn't help.)
Several iterations of their (often changing) business model seemed to focus around creating a high-prestige magazine (or close equivalent). And for a period of time, it seemed to be working; the Medium domain was often a sign that I was going to read something interesting and insightful, to the extent that I would be more likely to follow a link to Medium than to a domain I didn't recognise.
But launching a magazine is expensive; it requires money for high quality content, and money to pay for the editorial staff to run it. (And although I don't think Medium suffered from this especially, when that editorial staff makes editorial decisions, you run the risk of being sucket into the culture war, and the moment you deeply offend a large fraction of your audience because you censored/refused to censor Topic X, your economics suddenly get much much worse.)
And as a host of existing magazines have found out recently, there's no money in running a magazine anyhow, which I imagine explains why the quality of Medium content fell off a cliff, even as they started more and more aggressively trying to monetize things.
Adding to that, the UI was passable to start with, but actively deteriorated under their monetization efforts. At certain times, arriving at an article hosted on Medium with a small screensize could result in your browser being overwhelmingly filled with Medium UI, with little or no actual content visible.
If the content isn't reliably good, and the UX is reliably bad, what's left?
> Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well?
I think there is, it's just fantastically hard. If you look around, there are a small handful of newspapers, magazines, etc. that are still suceeding, putting out content while paying the bills. So it's like asking "can my home town paper be economically viable?" On the one hand, yes, the NYT has done it, so your local paper can too! On the other hand, 99% of newspapers are disasterous failures, and your local paper probably isn't going to be the NYT.
It's worth underlining the incredible ambition of what Medium wanted to do (in most of their business models anyhow). Failure wasn't inevitable, but it wasn't surprising.
(Also, the constant pivoting probably didn't help.)