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Wow, somehow I didn't realize they'd taken on that much funding. I have to agree, I don't see how they make their way out of this. Would love to be wrong, thoug

Wow, somehow I didn't realize they'd taken on that much funding. I have to agree, I don't see how they make their way out of this. Would love to be wrong, though.

Bartweiss 10y ago
My first thought was of the Silicon Valley episode about asking for a lower early valuation. $132 million is a stunning amount of money for a company with an online publishing platform and no real revenue, and I'm a bit shocked they let the numbers climb that high.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  "no real revenue" -- I don't think I've ever seen an ad. So what is their business model?
  - epmaybe 10y ago
    I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to start putting in ads once you've built a userbase
    - WalterSear 10y ago
      I not so sure. You might not die immediately, but you would start bleeding to death right away.
      - wyldfire 10y ago
        Worked for YouTube.
        scriptkiddy 10y ago
        The only reason it worked for youtube is that they were the only service offering reliable high quality video. Other video hosts had problems with loading times and reliability. Youtube is arguably a more valuable service in that it takes way more infrastructure to run a video hosting site than it does to run what is essentially, a simple blog. It would probably take no more than a year of development experience to build a site like Medium(leaving out scaling concerns). Youtube, on the other hand is a beast. I can't even imagine beginning to build an application like youtube. Youtube can push ads hard without bleeding users because they offer quality so many orders of magnitude higher than the alternatives. Medium has only one thing to offer: nice design.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I'm skeptical for Medium in particular. As a reader, their only advantage over other platforms is a clean, well-structured reading environment. I'd be very displeased if they did anything to damage that.
  - ecesena 10y ago
    medium is used as backend for some publications - there you see ads. Not (so far) on medium.com or users content.

Wow, somehow I didn't realize they'd taken on that much funding. I have to agree, I don't see how they make their way out of this. Would love to be wrong, though.

Bartweiss 10y ago

My first thought was of the Silicon Valley episode about asking for a lower early valuation. $132 million is a stunning amount of money for a company with an online publishing platform and no real revenue, and I'm a bit shocked they let the numbers climb that high.

wyldfire 10y ago
"no real revenue" -- I don't think I've ever seen an ad. So what is their business model?
- epmaybe 10y ago
  I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to start putting in ads once you've built a userbase
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    I not so sure. You might not die immediately, but you would start bleeding to death right away.
    - wyldfire 10y ago
      Worked for YouTube.
      - scriptkiddy 10y ago
        The only reason it worked for youtube is that they were the only service offering reliable high quality video. Other video hosts had problems with loading times and reliability. Youtube is arguably a more valuable service in that it takes way more infrastructure to run a video hosting site than it does to run what is essentially, a simple blog. It would probably take no more than a year of development experience to build a site like Medium(leaving out scaling concerns). Youtube, on the other hand is a beast. I can't even imagine beginning to build an application like youtube. Youtube can push ads hard without bleeding users because they offer quality so many orders of magnitude higher than the alternatives. Medium has only one thing to offer: nice design.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I'm skeptical for Medium in particular. As a reader, their only advantage over other platforms is a clean, well-structured reading environment. I'd be very displeased if they did anything to damage that.
- ecesena 10y ago
  medium is used as backend for some publications - there you see ads. Not (so far) on medium.com or users content.