{"id":36530,"date":"2022-07-15T15:03:56","date_gmt":"2022-07-15T19:03:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=36530"},"modified":"2022-07-15T15:04:26","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T19:04:26","slug":"ev-williams-to-step-down-from-medium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/15\/ev-williams-to-step-down-from-medium\/","title":{"rendered":"Ev Williams to Step Down From Medium"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ev Williams<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the launch of Medium. As we gear up for the next decade, I’ve decided to hand over the CEO reins.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Casey Newton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As I wrote at the time, by some measures Medium was succeeding. It had started 2021 with around 700,000 paid subscriptions, and was on track for more than $35 million in revenue from its $5 monthly subscription offering. At the same time, internal data showed that it largely was not high-quality journalism that was leading readers to subscribe: it was random stories posted to the platform by independent writers that happened to get featured by the Google or Facebook algorithms.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Nieman Lab<\/em>’s Laura Hazard Owen wrote an essential guide to Williams’ whipsawing in 2019<\/a>. Among the things Medium tried during his tenure, from its launch to the present day[…]<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

On the high end, well funded digital publishers from BuzzFeed<\/em> to Vice<\/em> to the Atlantic<\/em> 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. […] 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

M.G. Siegler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In fact, in many ways, that would be my critique of Medium on the front-end<\/em>. It has gone from utter<\/a> elegance<\/a> through to various stages of clutter and buttons to get people to sign up or download the app, etc. I just want people to be able to read<\/a> without anything but the words in front of them.<\/p>

But few people know that better than Coach Tony<\/a> who is maybe the<\/em> Medium power user since the get-go<\/a>. And now he gets the run the joint. So that’s exciting. Just don’t ruin this beautiful writing canvas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n