Re:Medium's Evan Williams to Publishers: Your Website Is Toast
by joelrunyon on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @05:41AM
(#10225544)
I would like to know he who's defining as a publisher.
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.
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.