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If you check out all of the "sponsored" or "partnership" content on Medium, like: https://theringer.com/ https://theringer.com/ https://electricliterature.com
by franzen 10y ago
If you check out all of the "sponsored" or "partnership" content on Medium, like:
https://theringer.com/ https://theringer.com/
https://electricliterature.com/ https://electricliterature.com/
https://medium.com/the-economist https://medium.com/the-economist
https://medium.com/@generalelectric https://medium.com/@generalelectric
https://medium.com/@Starbucks https://medium.com/@Starbucks
You'll notice the engagement is absolutely terrible. Between 10-100 likes, and even those stats are inflated by (no doubt terrified) Medium employees. Keep in mind, the rough "like" to "view" ratio is ~1:100, so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 views. Those are okay numbers when you're paying your writer/marketing guy $200 per post. Hardly the foundation for a company valued last year at $400M.
Of course, Medium could monetize with banner ads like every other site, and it does have enough traffic to do that (it's the 371th most visited site in the world.) However, most writers only write on Medium because there aren't any ads. If Medium suddenly started monetizing on my content "YouTube style" I would leave them for Wordpress in a second. The Medium community is fine (they'll drive 100-1000 views per post on my pieces) but that's not enough to justify graffitying my content with ads.
It seems like there's a major identity crisis going on here. On one hand, a lot of great pieces are published on Medium.
(Perhaps not as many since Medium de-funded/spun-out their flagship in-house publications, Matter and Backchannel). But there's also a crazy amount of crap. The top stories on Medium are almost invariably listicles and trite "How I Xed my Y in Z days".
I get the feeling Medium set out to position itself as a curated Wordpress (which might justify that gargantuan valuation) but these days it feels pretty much like an awkward, less popular, and slightly more erudite Buzzfeed.*
*Buzzfeed is not without its own problems. See traffic stats here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com
- douche 10y agoI used to love Grantland, it's sad to see it reduced to such a pale (and strikingly partisan) imitation as The Ringer has become. The Bill Simmons media empire has crashed and burned.
- tonystubblebine 10y agoI'm in your boat and was pretty disappointed by the initial incarnation of The Ringer. I heard Bill say on a podcast that he had a different theory about where media had gone. It was faster, mobile and more immediate. So the initial implementation of The Ringer seemed like short, trite pieces produced quickly. Like you'd get a dumb Game of Thrones piece within 15 minutes of an episode airing. Thankfully, they seem to have backed off and gone back to long form, loving fan pieces with obscure links and embeds. For example, this Donald Glover piece: https://theringer.com/you-have-to-take-donald-glover-seriously-now-56363bf513d3#.i452f5fho https://theringer.com/you-have-to-take-donald-glover-serious... TLDR; I'm curious what you think of the more recent Ringer stuff. Because to me, it's so much better and is exactly why I loved the old Grantland.
- aaron-lebo 10y agoThanks for linking to this. I too loved Grantland and have been disappointed with Simmons' more recent efforts, but this is good. And Atlanta is fantastic.
- tonystubblebine 10y agoThanks! Yeah, a lot of the new Ringer stuff has been great. The Simmons model of content written by true fans is a great model. The low quality version of that doesn't work. But they seem to have figured it out and new posts have been much higher quality.
- douche 10y agoI'll have to start checking it more frequently. It even appears that Bill has actually started writing again. Maybe there'll even be a mailbag again someday...
- Touche 10y agoOne thing that Simmons has never figured out is that just because someone shares your interest for football doesn't mean they share your interest for mafia movies. Instead of making 1 site (or 1 show) that is a grab-bag of various things-that-Bill-Simmons-likes, why not have several niche sites that cover different topics? I can't read The Ringer because I don't want to get movie reviews from the same place I get NBA game breakdowns. Also, the ratio of joke articles to serious articles is all wrong. It should be 1 joke article for every 10 serious articles, at least.
- minimaxir 10y agoBuzzFeed is an interesting reference because they've switched to an emphasis on video content (higher engagement + more ad opportunities) as a hedge against the declining publishing industry. If Medium allows native video publishing, that would certainly be a curveball.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tonystubblebine 10y ago> so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 view I think there's probably a problem in these numbers, but I'm 99% certain you've misread the tea leaves. The Ringer page views are through the roof. But those are not coming from regular Medium users who typically leave reviews. So the problem is, why don't these visitors engage more, rather than why doesn't The Ringer have any page views. IMO, big sites like The Ringer are bets that obscure what's wonderful and working at Medium. For a blogger like me, posting to Medium is a 10x on page views. 37Signals posted something similar. All the mid-size blogs that come over are having a great time.
- fluxic 10y agoTo be fair, The Ringer is a pretty big outlier. "Have Bill Simmons tweet every article we post" isn't really a replicable business model.
- tonystubblebine 10y agoYeah, and it's the only site on that list that I know anything about. Just wanted to point out that you can't judge page views based on the number of recommends that a Ringer article gets.
- kkhire 10y agoyou still would get way more viewership on linkedin posts, even though their system sucks
- tonystubblebine 10y agoI've been trying to get to the heart of Quora and LinkedIn view numbers. My experience is that the absolute value is high but that the value of those people is close to nil. I know I'm not alone, but I don't know if that's a near universal experience. My anecdotal experience is that I never get retweeets or mail from things I post there, whereas the people who read and then respond on Medium seem like the exact kind of people I want to influence. Not all viewers are created equal.
- 10y ago
- CN7R 10y agoWould people still have problems with advertisement if it was extremely tailored towards them? I'd presume Medium already collects data on their users and their preferences -- does Medium sell that to ad. companies, and is it effective in its current state? Maybe Medium can still expand outwards, such as if they created a Google chrome extension or browser annotator to save all the highlights I have on other websites that I read (e.g. NYtimes, Bloomberg); and later using that data to give better ads -- I probably wouldn't mind if it wasn't intrusive.