In my mind it never had a good reputation. Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot, (2) technically running your blog, and (3) promoting your blog. In principle Medium took (2) and (3) out of your hands so you could focus on (1) but I think Medium attracted a person who was too lazy to blog before and who is interested in working on (1) as little as they are on (2) and (3).
In principle you might make some money blogging on Medium but a lot of people blog to promote themselves or their business and the registration wall reduced their reach and actually damaged their personal brand because I think a lot of people felt it was annoying to have to register to read articles on a blogging platform that is just a bit worse than the rest of the web as opposed to just a bit better. (Certainly anyone whose Medium blog posts connected with someone has received an email telling them it's a shame that a good blogger is blogging on Medium)
How much truth is in this often-repeated statement?
This isn't always the case. You might be an otherwise famous individual who will have an audience regardless of your publishing frequency. But I think for most bloggers, you have to have enough material that people will visit, and continue to make more so people will come back.
I published between 1 and 3 times a year on my blog/website. But then I'm not doing it for income.
Quite a bit. I would say my blog has been successful, but it only happened after I had written a lot, which was about 100 posts and about 150 posts in a blog that now doesn't exist.
To be successful, your need to get an audience. To get an audience, you have to either build one over time or go viral at least once. I've done both.
To build an audience over time, you need to give them a lot to read so that they won't forget you and will keep coming back.
Going viral is a luck thing, but you sure do get better chances of going viral the more you post.
My first viral post was posted on Hacker News at a time when I thought it wouldn't go viral for sure: on Saturday night (my time). I didn't want that one to go viral, but I thought I would post it anyway to attract some readers.
Oh boy.
I woke up the next morning to a headache.
Since then, when I want to make an impact, I post during my nighttime. Turns out, posting that on a Saturday night was perfect because my most viral posts have been, with one or two exceptions.
But I wouldn't have been able to sample that enough to know if I didn't have 50-100 (tech-oriented) blog posts to try with.
So yeah, it's true.
The second definitely improves with consistent output. I assume the first does too, but they often are continually revising their “masterpiece” so it can be harder to see
I'd add to that that brand reputation is monetisable and monetised. It's almost a playbook at this point: sell something high quality to people who are really into that thing, get a good reputation, then dilute the quality down and you can coast on that reputation for a while while selling cheaper versions at the original high prices to a much wider audience.
I don't know what the counter to this is, other than customers paying much more attention to when a brand changes their products, which would not be free for them.
Very similar to this phenomenon, in relation to imgur and so forth:
https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
I think that all image hosts suffer from the same sad pattern of eventual failure. That pattern is:
I wouldn't place the blame squarely on the company however. It's also true that consumers have predictable behavior patterns -- they want free stuff, and they will stick around to get that, and then move to the next thing.
On the other hand, we want free stuff because we don't want to sign up for subscriptions, and companies are always making that annoying -- betting on us forgetting to cancel, making it hard to cancel, tacking on hidden fees (banks do a lot of this), etc.
I wish that money could just be exchanged for goods and services, as Homer Simpson once noted ...
Although I would also consider the other side of the "sharing economy" -- IMO sharing like Zipcar makes a lot of economic sense, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for incumbents there (although I guess Zipcar got bought).
Likewise with the taxi and hotel industries -- the incumbents deserve some competition / disruption.
But yeah consumers are certainly fickle
I mean most of the value there is in text written by volunteers, which must not be so expensive to host (compared to, say, an image hosting site for example).
it would require a really strong mission statement baked into the company to say "we are here to provide value to our users and everything else has to come second to that". if nothing else you eventually get acquired, e.g. tumblr, and everything goes to hell then.
https://Groups.io (rebooted Yahoo Groups).
Unfortunately, none of those things is particularly easy to charge money for. So you take Venture Capital to fund your development, and then you try to find a way to pay that VC through other means - Advertising mostly, it turns out. Then you have to keep pushing that because your investors want returns, and it funds the party.
The thing is, all of these companies make money by arbitraging value consumed by the end users versus value produced by advertisers. It’s a two sided market, except that consumers pay in attention rather than currency.
It’s catchy - and probably true - to say that if you aren’t paying, “then you are the product”. But these companies still need a quality product or, eventually, the advertising and data collection is not valuable to those with money.
Which is what we seem to be seeing with Twitter.
Abusing end users is a very short sighted strategy, even if they’re not paying.
Many of these giant sites are really in the business of talking money out of investors, so their main business is not really selling a service at all (its "investor storytime").
I don't think that arbitrage model is useful because one side is paying cash and the other is not. Its like calling dating a marketplace, a bad metaphor.
Facebook makes money by creating a product that attracts a bunch of people to use it, and then they sell ads.
The whole thing falls apart if they don’t do #1 properly.
> Facebook's business was providing a common platform for people that know each other to share publicly. Twitter's business was a billboard to share what they're doing. Google's business was to provide a way to find things on the web.
They may have other businesses in banner ads but I’m specifically responding to the question,
> do all platforms go through this? if so, it's very sad.
by trying to make the point that if their business is selling attention, then pissing off end users - thereby reducing the supply of attention - is bad management.
With blogging platforms, an additional aspect: I don’t really care to read the opinions of people who are mostly interested in blogging about a topic. I want to read from actual practitioners. As soon as a platform becomes well known, the non-practicing bloggers show up and it turns into a crapshoot whether what I’m reading is first or third hand information.
And that’s during the early still-OK-ish phase. After a while the natural tendency is that the non-practicing folks will produce more content because they’ve got more spare time!
8<------------------------------
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/