The one pivot Medium could do - and potentially reap large fiscal revenues & find profits in turn - would be to become a Writing Talent Incubator. They have the

The one pivot Medium could do - and potentially reap large fiscal revenues & find profits in turn - would be to become a Writing Talent Incubator. They have the Ecosystem. They have the Banner. If they have cash, then they can get into the Rights Management sector and pursue the sources of almost every modern Media or Communication Content: Writers. Compared to Engineers, Writers are dirt cheap. Funding in the tens of thousands of dollars per writer - or unicorn hundred thousand for some really promising ones - is the pathway to getting Content that can be monetized. If they play nicely with Writers and not make the "Indentured Servant Musician Record Label Contract" a staple of their model, it could attract a lot of attention in a good way. Mutual long term benefit = good business. Unfortunately the Hit-to-Miss ratio isn't something I'm confident Medium wants to buy into. As in, if the most popular Writers sling pretty unappealing material (ex: Self Help, Conspiracy Theories) then it could take a lot of work figuring out where the gold might be. Having lots of data and pieces to examine through their systems certainly provides an advantage at the outset. It's still all about risk and reward though. The big hits are what cover for the bad bets. It's a viable business model, until it isn't. Which, honestly, goes for a lot of other types of businesses too (times change, tastes change, regulations change, etc) so it's not out of the realm of consideration. Basically I see Medium as right in the sweet spot where Netflix turned the corner. Licensing content and being the distributor is grunt work. The real money comes from owning the fountains. In a perfect world Medium would buy-up Script Revolution tomorrow, specifically the founder/creator, and begin the Content / Writer Incubator attempt with sincerity with his cultivated pool of writers, and see how it turns out. Such a pivot definitely has some appeal to me as both a Content Creator and Consumer, and is, dare I say it, a bit more innovative than figuring out a new part of the donkey to pin the ad tail on.