I don't think Medium understood the online media economy when it began, and I don't think they understand it now. With the advent of the Internet, content creat

I don't think Medium understood the online media economy when it began, and I don't think they understand it now. With the advent of the Internet, content creators like newspapers and television networks saw the barriers to competition slip away. They were confronted simultaneously with burgeoning supply (which pushes prices for that supply down the curve) as well as more rigorous methods to track how people respond to advertising. One reason why online ads cost less than those in the print edition of newspapers is because they can be tracked, and the results show that people don't respond that much to them. The argument for pricing print ads higher is that print editions have actual subscribers, and therefore disposable income. That subscription model was the basis of a golden age of news for decades, because publishers could be assured of their income, and disengage their reporters from the battle for clicks. They were free to pursue the most newsworthy news. It was a kind of ivory tower. Now that tower is crumbling, faster every year, even if Trump's election caused an uptick in subscriptions in the digital editions of some newspapers. Online subscribers will always be a tiny minority of all readers (I subscribe to some publications, but I understand why many don't), because of the river of free content. In an age of disintermediation, content has gone in the opposite direction, handing more and more money over to middlemen like the ad networks and search engines and social networks, while content creators get less and less of every dollar. They are, in a sense, like farmers, who raise our food from the earth but receive very little compared to the distributors. Laying off 50 people and changing one's business model won't change that dynamic one bit.