Join us Sept. 14-16 in Miami to connect with top publishing leaders
Another day, another new distraction — or as my editor Brian Morrissey calls it, a YAP: Yet Another Platform. Yesterday the grand Internet publishing experiment continued with the launch of Medium, brought to you by Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the guys who gave us Twitter. Medium, as the name would imply, sets out to be the Goldilocks of publishing: not too short, not too long, just the right length of formatting. Great. Only one question: how will it make money?
Williams and Stone are attempting to “rethink publishing.” What that entails is still anyone’s guess. Medium’s idea is to celebrate content and not the author, so that topic trumps author, a blend of blog, social network, photo-sharing site.
Medium faces an uphill battle on three fronts: no advertising (so no revenue unless they charge for use, which leads to); who will use it (“beyond an initial crowd of try-anything-once types,” as Nieman Labs points out, because…); there are already other platforms to do this.
One of the truisms of media (old and new) is that technology and advertising are in the driver’s seat. We’ve seen how technology has upended the publishing landscape. It may sound reductionist, but advertising, no matter your personal feelings about it, is vital for a publisher. Show me a publisher who can survive without any form of advertising and I’ll show you a cat riding atop a unicorn through a rainbow.
More in Media
An anatomy of the creator brand trip’s midlife crisis
The brand trip as we know it may be dead, but a newer, more genuine and engaging format is rising from its ashes.
European publishers are getting hit harder by AI bot scraping, report finds
European publishers face more AI bot scraping, fewer referrals and more ignored robots.txt rules than North American sites, report finds.
Walmart-backed gaming publication lays off editorial team
Brandy Berthelson — who had been Restart’s editor-in-chief — said on Bluesky last Friday that the “entire editorial team” at Restart was laid off.