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I will offer a counter opinion, the problem with Medium (or to some extent Quora) is not that they raised too much funding but rather they bet incorrectly on th
by aub3bhat 10y ago
I will offer a counter opinion, the problem with Medium (or to some extent Quora) is not that they raised too much funding but rather they bet incorrectly on the content. As much as readers on Hacker News might want to believe otherwise, light/low-intellectual-effort content such as memes, listicles, gifs, images are far far more profitable than wordy blogposts & articles. Sure you might get lucky and have a viral article once in a while, but low effort content delivers far better median return.
Regarding the funding, consider that Buzzfeed has raised 446.3M$ and Giphy has raised 150.95M$. The money raised is consistent with the kind of site he had envisioned, the issue is that there isn't a market for it.
- chrisabrams 10y agoI concur with you that they bet too much on their content. The question then is: did the vicious cycle start from raising too much, or betting incorrectly?
- aub3bhat 10y agoWhen you are worth few hundred million to a billion dollars. The only rate limiting condition is the time you have left, and the window of opportunity. From his perspective (and correctly) there isn't any point in bootstrapping. Medium is not the first such example, you also have Path (where sadly one of the co-founder was not as rich), Quora, and as a counter example Uber.
- __derek__ 10y ago> The money raised is consistent with the kind of site he had envisioned, the issue is that there isn't a market for it. It seems that it wasn't necessarily too much money but too much too soon. It's like Tumblr redux: the product was (intentionally or not) built to put ads in front of lots of loyal eyes, but the founder refuses. In that sense, they lack real product-market fit.
- jsjohnst 10y agoNot that I disagree with you, but Tumblr, among others, disproves that money can be made on sites that focus on the "low effort" content.