Tuesday Hoisted from the Archives: Ben Thompson on Medium...
Live from the Internet from 2015: Medium the Network: "The most pertinent analysis is from The Facebook Reckoning. Specifically:
(May 22, 2015):
- Identity matters
- Native advertising (specifically, in-feed advertising) is the most effective ad unit
- Native advertising only really works for “destination” apps and sites....
If Medium can consistently draw people to visit Medium directly—and login—it can monetize them with highly-targeted in-stream ads. Keep in mind Medium has the potential to gain a pretty unique signal into people’s interests: not just what they read, but also what they highlight and comment.... The way you build a successful content platform is to focus on serving content creators first.... Williams... has done this before, and the idea that what gets your product off the ground is not always the same as what makes you valuable is one I very much subscribe to.... Medium does have a unique organizing principle: ideas. That gives them better incentives to serve content creators than Facebook and a different graph; said graph is closer to Twitter’s, but given Twitter’s refusal to think beyond the timeline and 140 characters for any reason, even direct messages or @-replies, Medium may be able to carve out their own space. It will, though, be a long haul.
Medium and the Publishing Long Tail: "I think there are other long tail opportunities in publishing...
(September 17, 2015):...opportunit[ies] to serve niche publications.... The words you are reading are my differentiator, which is to say their creation is non-scalable. However, nearly everything I do could be done much lower cost and effort across multiple sites: hosting, customer support, ad sales, membership management, even financial and banking services. That’s why I was very interested to hear Ev Williams suggest this is a part of Medium’s roadmap... (paraphrased)....
We haven’t solved [the writer’s making money] problem quite yet. We will. We’re not going to invent some new way to make money from publishing. We will do a 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.
This is a long-tail play built on people like me: Medium puts everything in place for a writer to make a go of independence, and keeps a percentage... most will fail, but in aggregate Medium will probably do quite well. And, if any one writer takes off, Medium could earn quite a tidy return.... It’s also a nice fit in Medium’s portfolio with their other long-tail play.... Capture all of the individual writers and aggregate them into a destination stream complete with native advertising...
Medium and Custom Domains: "From the Medium blog:
(March 13, 2015):Everyone who posts on Medium already owns the rights to the original content they publish, but many have also expressed a desire to host Medium stories at their own domain.... Today, we’re happy to announce that we are taking the first steps towards making this a reality with the limited beta launch of custom domains....
This move, particularly in conjunction with changes last month to enable more short-form posts, certainly seem to more firmly position Medium as the evolutionary blogging platform. The question, though, is to what end?... If Nuzzel is where you find things to read, and Twitter is the conduit over which those links pass, then Medium theoretically is where that content actually lives. That make the service a publisher. That, though, is in the long run not worth that much. Value flows to the ends... and away from whatever publisher or service [is] in the middle.... The more important development at Medium is the continued evolvement of the Reading List and recommendation engine--and by extension, the transformation into a platform...