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I think Medium showed the world that you can't build a subscription business by commoditizing the content. I've read a lot of great content on Medium, but I don

I think Medium showed the world that you can't build a subscription business by commoditizing the content. I've read a lot of great content on Medium, but I don't remember who it was by, and that's why I never considered subscribing to Medium. Their content lacks the personality that platforms like Substack, and even traditional online newspapers like NYTimes, possess.

blowski 4y ago
To me, Substack just looks like a clone of Medium. What makes it different?
- paxys 4y ago
  The big difference is that Substack puts its writers front and center, while Medium focuses on itself. People read Substack content every day without even realizing that the company exists. Authors can build their own brands and gather a dedicated following without too much interference.
- bspear 4y ago
  Individual writers control their own email lists
- ProAm 4y ago
  The UI is better.
  - blowski 4y ago
    Better how? I remember when Medium first came out, everyone fawned over the quality of the UI.
- karpierz 4y ago
  A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions. And a personal subscription model.
  - kodah 4y ago
    > A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions These are also features of Medium, maybe most blogs. Being discerning is also a required feature of the internet, regardless what one might dream of, imo.
  - ifyoubuildit 4y ago
    This seems like a pretty uncharitable take, and one thats unlikely to be true. Do you think substack has some metric on "unsubstantiated opinions" that they're trying to maximize? Or have you just noticed more content that you disagree with there?
  - aikah 4y ago
    - morelisp 4y ago
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Substack exists because someone launched a very different business model than Medium. They also have a program where they pay prominent people advances to switch (https://on.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers https://on.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers). Greenwald's Medium is still up. He just never really used it. https://medium.com/@ggreenwald/almost-nobody-reads-these-posts-35ab88d8aaf9 https://medium.com/@ggreenwald/almost-nobody-reads-these-pos...
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Whereas Medium works better for network effects/SEO (and why it became super popular before Facebook/Twitter became the most reliable methods of distribution for personal articles), Substack has a better writer/reader relationship, which matters when trying to make a living off of it. Although as a result, it incentivises "thought leadership" more than Medium, which is funny in retrospect since Medium was the blogging platform that started the trend. Conversely, technical content doesn't do as well on Substack.
- huac 4y ago
  I wrote this piece about the different subscription models a few years back and think that it held up very well: https://hua.substack.com/p/subscriptions-as-price-discrimination https://hua.substack.com/p/subscriptions-as-price-discrimina... In particular re Medium: > On the backend, the way [Medium's] partner program works is that users’ membership fees are allocated proportionally to the writer based on how many articles the user read. Fine. Also there is something about clapping. I guess if I really like a writer I could make sure to read a lot of their articles so they can get some of that membership fee. But, as a consumer, I: a. can’t subscribe directly to the writer, and b. can’t signal that I value their content at more than $5 per month. No amount of claps can make up for that! Writers and readers both don't get the right amount of value from their framework.
- notatoad 4y ago
  The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience. They're a middleman where both the author and reader is a customer of Medium, which puts them in the position of having to balance the needs of authors and readers. The Substack model is that you provide both content and audience, and they provide hosting and monetization tools. They're a service provider where only the author is their customer, and so they're able to focus exclusively on what the authors need.
  - xhkkffbf 4y ago
    The substack model seems to be more focused on building and supporting individual brands. So I don't think of visiting Substack, I think of checking out what X, Y or Z said. The Substack brand is subordinate to the individual blogs/writers.
  - blowski 4y ago
    So they don’t promote content in the way that Medium tries to do?
    - erichocean 4y ago
      Correct, no promotion at all.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        There is some discovery if you go look for it actually. It's just toned down and left for the user's initiative, instead of bugging you every chance it gets :)
  - nickjj 4y ago
    > The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience. This doesn't happen in practice. Like most marketplaces they have an incentive to market things that are popular or appear to be trending. That means in order for Medium to promote your article you need to do the marketing with your own audience or outlets to get eyeballs on the article and after Medium flags your article as popular it might get promoted. This is a really big concept because it means if you're just starting off with no audience you might as well grow your own audience on your platform because most marketplaces like Medium (and others) aren't heavily promoting folks with no prior audience. I remember putting some of my blog posts on Medium and setting the canonical URL back to my site. Out of the hundreds of thousands of visits my personal blog got I only had a few hundred total hits on Medium. That's because I didn't promote and drive my own traffic to Medium and in turn they didn't promote me.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  When I load a Substack article, I see the article, with only the distraction of the "JavaScript required" banner at the top, and the page works without JavaScript. When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Try Scribe, a private front end for medium and GitHub Gists. https://scribe.rip/ https://scribe.rip/
    - czottmann 4y ago
      That proxy is great, thanks for sharing! Most annoying thing about Medium pages is the multi-second waiting period while the page is loading. (On Chrome on a M1 Pro, mind.)
      - jacooper 4y ago
        You can install an extensions called libredirect that would auto redirect, Medium, YouTube, Twitter and many others to private proxies. Its not available on the chrome store because of manifest V2, there is privacy redirect but its abandoned and doesn't support scribe. https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect
  - dubswithus 4y ago
    You can open medium links in incognito mode.
    - flyingfences 4y ago
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Medium is a bad value proposition for those who make good content, therefore they tend to leave and as a result the only thing left is trash. “Medium.com” nowadays is a sign of low quality and I personally started skipping articles because of that alone.
- andrewfong 4y ago
  The paywall on Medium prompts me to subscribe to Medium (and presumably, some of the money goes to the authors). It feels like a magazine. My relationship is with Medium, not individual authors. With Substack, I'm prompted to subscribe directly to newsletters from individual authors. None of the authors I follow on Twitter tell me to subscribe to Mediums. A bunch of them point me towards their Substacks.
- kradeelav 4y ago
  Substack fills an explicitly free-speech need (for now) in an age where the backbone/service providers of the internet's conveniently forgotten why that's important. You get a lot more interesting writers on board than Medium in that case. People who stick to the safe areas of thought don't make history (for good or ill).
  - rchaud 4y ago
    "Free speech" isn't a business model, unless the business plan is to sell a story to VCs and get paid a percentage of the term sheet. Substack has to pay the "I'm being cancelled" blowhards huge sums to get them on the platform to begin with. They earn nothing from eyeball traffic; people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage. And even if they did, Substack would earn a tiny pittance from their fraction of subscription fees from that demographic.
    - skybrian 4y ago
      That's not how it worked. Some authors got paid a big advance in return for giving up all subscription revenue for one year. In at least some cases, authors said they would have made more money taking the regular subscription deal, where Substack gets a cut. So in those cases, Substack provided financing and made money on it in the end. I don't know if that's true on average, though.
      - jacobr1 4y ago
        It is a classic platform bootstrapping model. It worked with new book publishers in the 1800s too. It worked for new video game consoles, etc ... The content creator doesn't fully trust the new publisher/platform, so they need upfront monetary assurance beyond a normal advance/royalty type deal, in case the platform fails. Likewise the platform values exclusives from big names that will drive demand for the platform. So the platform gives up potential upside to secure the exclusivity rights and the content creators get a premium.
      - Lazare 4y ago
        I've seen a fair bit of discussion about this, and so far, every author who I've seen talk about this has said they took the deal and came out behind, or they refused the deal but would have come out behind if they'd taken it, ie, subscription revenue ended up exceeding the offered advance. I imagine there must be some authors out there who didn't mmet Substack's expectations, but they're apparently few and far between.
- Lazare 4y ago
  For now at least, Substack has much, much better UI. Beyond that, Substack is currently positioning themselves as a platform/tool for content creators to create their own brand and market to their own audience. If you aren't paying attention, you might not even notice that your favourite author was on Substack; they're functionally a spiritual descendent of the independent blogs of old (who might be running on MT or Wordpress or whatever, but weren't a "Wordpress blog by Joe Smith", but "Joe Smith's blog" (which happens to be on Wordpress). Medium has been positioning themselves as a content brand in their own right for some time; they have been undergoing relentless business model churn, but at various times they've had editorial teams, they've commissioned work, they've had writers on payroll, and they've had verticals or "editorial teams" or whatever such as OneZero, Forge, Marker, and Elemental. Those last I think were launched in 2019 and killed off in 2021; but functioned like magazines published by Medium with editors and staff writers. I'm not quite sure what todays strategy is, but it seems to still be focused on the publisher/magazine model where the brand is "Medium" and the author just gets a byline. You can see this approach in terms of features like theming, URL structures, support for custom domains, etc. (Eg, Substack supports custom domains; Medium recently ended their support.)
amelius 4y ago
Medium is simply YouTube for written content. So what holds for Medium holds for YouTube and vice versa.
- paxys 4y ago
  Except YouTube is wildly more popular and sustainable. Any company would kill to be the YouTube of [xyz].
- hellomyguys 4y ago
  A platform isn't necessarily neutral. It can cultivate and influence the culture that that exists on it. Medium never really seemed to do that imo.
- picardo 4y ago
  YouTube has a great personalization algorithm and a lot of content. Content and personalization make up a virtuous cycle, and drive higher engagement rates, which drives ad rates higher. Medium has neither the scale, content nor the engagement to be as valuable a platform for advertisers.
- cloogshicer 4y ago
  > So what holds for Medium holds for YouTube and vice versa. I think the fact that YT hosts video makes it quite a different beast from Medium. Self hosting video is still quite difficult, and expensive. Hosting text is much cheaper and simpler. This fact changes the game quite a bit.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    On the other hand, managing a monetization platform (subscription billing, customer support, linking posts to email to social media notifications) is more complex than self-hosting. Not impossible, but more than most writers would want to take on themselves.
- erichocean 4y ago
  > Medium is simply YouTube for written content. They wish! Medium is Vimeo.
tonystubblebine 4y ago
I'm the new guy replacing Ev at Medium. I don't think that you can't build a subscription business at Medium. What I told the team internally is that we had a Goldilocks problem where one thing we tried was wrong in one direction and what we're doing now is problematic in a different direction. But I've been publishing on Medium since the beginning and have a pretty good sense of the intersection of quality and Medium's model. What I'm saying is keep an open mind. We grew a pretty large subscription already with a lot still that we can do to make it much higher quality.
- __rito__ 4y ago
  I quit your platform because you didn't have Partner Program in India. I do not want to monetize my writings anymore, but there was one day, when I did. But your behavior made that impossible. You said once Stripe start working in India, you'd start MPP in India, then they started in Beta. Then you said when Stripe comes out of Beta, you will have MPP in India. Then when Stripe started full-fledged service in India, you stopped mentioning India. This behavior really frustrated me and made me stopped considering Medium seriously for anything. I made good money on Quora in the past. They could send money to India- no problem, but not you guys. I don't want money for my writings now. I want all of them to be free. But I am angry at Medium, and would never be returning.
- ok123456 4y ago
  can you cool it with the javascript?
- hartator 4y ago
  Good luck Tony. I've been using Medium as a reader, writer, and subscriber for some years. And nowadays I am unconsciously not using Medium as much in profit of Substack and Ghost. My main draw to Medium as a writer was to reach lot of people. A random paywall means less reach. Not sure if max reach and paywall are reconcilable and solvable.
  - socialdemocrat 4y ago
    But you choose yourself if you want to paywall an article. If you don’t like paywall articles then don’t create them. What am I missing?

blowski 4y ago

To me, Substack just looks like a clone of Medium. What makes it different?

paxys 4y ago
The big difference is that Substack puts its writers front and center, while Medium focuses on itself. People read Substack content every day without even realizing that the company exists. Authors can build their own brands and gather a dedicated following without too much interference.
bspear 4y ago
Individual writers control their own email lists
ProAm 4y ago
The UI is better.
- blowski 4y ago
  Better how? I remember when Medium first came out, everyone fawned over the quality of the UI.
karpierz 4y ago
A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions. And a personal subscription model.
- kodah 4y ago
  > A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions These are also features of Medium, maybe most blogs. Being discerning is also a required feature of the internet, regardless what one might dream of, imo.
- ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  This seems like a pretty uncharitable take, and one thats unlikely to be true. Do you think substack has some metric on "unsubstantiated opinions" that they're trying to maximize? Or have you just noticed more content that you disagree with there?
- aikah 4y ago
  - morelisp 4y ago
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Substack exists because someone launched a very different business model than Medium. They also have a program where they pay prominent people advances to switch (https://on.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers https://on.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers). Greenwald's Medium is still up. He just never really used it. https://medium.com/@ggreenwald/almost-nobody-reads-these-posts-35ab88d8aaf9 https://medium.com/@ggreenwald/almost-nobody-reads-these-pos...
minimaxir 4y ago
Whereas Medium works better for network effects/SEO (and why it became super popular before Facebook/Twitter became the most reliable methods of distribution for personal articles), Substack has a better writer/reader relationship, which matters when trying to make a living off of it. Although as a result, it incentivises "thought leadership" more than Medium, which is funny in retrospect since Medium was the blogging platform that started the trend. Conversely, technical content doesn't do as well on Substack.
huac 4y ago
I wrote this piece about the different subscription models a few years back and think that it held up very well: https://hua.substack.com/p/subscriptions-as-price-discrimination https://hua.substack.com/p/subscriptions-as-price-discrimina... In particular re Medium: > On the backend, the way [Medium's] partner program works is that users’ membership fees are allocated proportionally to the writer based on how many articles the user read. Fine. Also there is something about clapping. I guess if I really like a writer I could make sure to read a lot of their articles so they can get some of that membership fee. But, as a consumer, I: a. can’t subscribe directly to the writer, and b. can’t signal that I value their content at more than $5 per month. No amount of claps can make up for that! Writers and readers both don't get the right amount of value from their framework.
notatoad 4y ago
The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience. They're a middleman where both the author and reader is a customer of Medium, which puts them in the position of having to balance the needs of authors and readers. The Substack model is that you provide both content and audience, and they provide hosting and monetization tools. They're a service provider where only the author is their customer, and so they're able to focus exclusively on what the authors need.
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  The substack model seems to be more focused on building and supporting individual brands. So I don't think of visiting Substack, I think of checking out what X, Y or Z said. The Substack brand is subordinate to the individual blogs/writers.
- blowski 4y ago
  So they don’t promote content in the way that Medium tries to do?
  - erichocean 4y ago
    Correct, no promotion at all.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      There is some discovery if you go look for it actually. It's just toned down and left for the user's initiative, instead of bugging you every chance it gets :)
- nickjj 4y ago
  > The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience. This doesn't happen in practice. Like most marketplaces they have an incentive to market things that are popular or appear to be trending. That means in order for Medium to promote your article you need to do the marketing with your own audience or outlets to get eyeballs on the article and after Medium flags your article as popular it might get promoted. This is a really big concept because it means if you're just starting off with no audience you might as well grow your own audience on your platform because most marketplaces like Medium (and others) aren't heavily promoting folks with no prior audience. I remember putting some of my blog posts on Medium and setting the canonical URL back to my site. Out of the hundreds of thousands of visits my personal blog got I only had a few hundred total hits on Medium. That's because I didn't promote and drive my own traffic to Medium and in turn they didn't promote me.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
When I load a Substack article, I see the article, with only the distraction of the "JavaScript required" banner at the top, and the page works without JavaScript. When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Try Scribe, a private front end for medium and GitHub Gists. https://scribe.rip/ https://scribe.rip/
  - czottmann 4y ago
    That proxy is great, thanks for sharing! Most annoying thing about Medium pages is the multi-second waiting period while the page is loading. (On Chrome on a M1 Pro, mind.)
    - jacooper 4y ago
      You can install an extensions called libredirect that would auto redirect, Medium, YouTube, Twitter and many others to private proxies. Its not available on the chrome store because of manifest V2, there is privacy redirect but its abandoned and doesn't support scribe. https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect
- dubswithus 4y ago
  You can open medium links in incognito mode.
  - flyingfences 4y ago
Nextgrid 4y ago
Medium is a bad value proposition for those who make good content, therefore they tend to leave and as a result the only thing left is trash. “Medium.com” nowadays is a sign of low quality and I personally started skipping articles because of that alone.
andrewfong 4y ago
The paywall on Medium prompts me to subscribe to Medium (and presumably, some of the money goes to the authors). It feels like a magazine. My relationship is with Medium, not individual authors. With Substack, I'm prompted to subscribe directly to newsletters from individual authors. None of the authors I follow on Twitter tell me to subscribe to Mediums. A bunch of them point me towards their Substacks.
kradeelav 4y ago
Substack fills an explicitly free-speech need (for now) in an age where the backbone/service providers of the internet's conveniently forgotten why that's important. You get a lot more interesting writers on board than Medium in that case. People who stick to the safe areas of thought don't make history (for good or ill).
- rchaud 4y ago
  "Free speech" isn't a business model, unless the business plan is to sell a story to VCs and get paid a percentage of the term sheet. Substack has to pay the "I'm being cancelled" blowhards huge sums to get them on the platform to begin with. They earn nothing from eyeball traffic; people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage. And even if they did, Substack would earn a tiny pittance from their fraction of subscription fees from that demographic.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    That's not how it worked. Some authors got paid a big advance in return for giving up all subscription revenue for one year. In at least some cases, authors said they would have made more money taking the regular subscription deal, where Substack gets a cut. So in those cases, Substack provided financing and made money on it in the end. I don't know if that's true on average, though.
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      It is a classic platform bootstrapping model. It worked with new book publishers in the 1800s too. It worked for new video game consoles, etc ... The content creator doesn't fully trust the new publisher/platform, so they need upfront monetary assurance beyond a normal advance/royalty type deal, in case the platform fails. Likewise the platform values exclusives from big names that will drive demand for the platform. So the platform gives up potential upside to secure the exclusivity rights and the content creators get a premium.
    - Lazare 4y ago
      I've seen a fair bit of discussion about this, and so far, every author who I've seen talk about this has said they took the deal and came out behind, or they refused the deal but would have come out behind if they'd taken it, ie, subscription revenue ended up exceeding the offered advance. I imagine there must be some authors out there who didn't mmet Substack's expectations, but they're apparently few and far between.
Lazare 4y ago
For now at least, Substack has much, much better UI. Beyond that, Substack is currently positioning themselves as a platform/tool for content creators to create their own brand and market to their own audience. If you aren't paying attention, you might not even notice that your favourite author was on Substack; they're functionally a spiritual descendent of the independent blogs of old (who might be running on MT or Wordpress or whatever, but weren't a "Wordpress blog by Joe Smith", but "Joe Smith's blog" (which happens to be on Wordpress). Medium has been positioning themselves as a content brand in their own right for some time; they have been undergoing relentless business model churn, but at various times they've had editorial teams, they've commissioned work, they've had writers on payroll, and they've had verticals or "editorial teams" or whatever such as OneZero, Forge, Marker, and Elemental. Those last I think were launched in 2019 and killed off in 2021; but functioned like magazines published by Medium with editors and staff writers. I'm not quite sure what todays strategy is, but it seems to still be focused on the publisher/magazine model where the brand is "Medium" and the author just gets a byline. You can see this approach in terms of features like theming, URL structures, support for custom domains, etc. (Eg, Substack supports custom domains; Medium recently ended their support.)

amelius 4y ago

Medium is simply YouTube for written content. So what holds for Medium holds for YouTube and vice versa.

paxys 4y ago
Except YouTube is wildly more popular and sustainable. Any company would kill to be the YouTube of [xyz].
hellomyguys 4y ago
A platform isn't necessarily neutral. It can cultivate and influence the culture that that exists on it. Medium never really seemed to do that imo.
picardo 4y ago
YouTube has a great personalization algorithm and a lot of content. Content and personalization make up a virtuous cycle, and drive higher engagement rates, which drives ad rates higher. Medium has neither the scale, content nor the engagement to be as valuable a platform for advertisers.
cloogshicer 4y ago
> So what holds for Medium holds for YouTube and vice versa. I think the fact that YT hosts video makes it quite a different beast from Medium. Self hosting video is still quite difficult, and expensive. Hosting text is much cheaper and simpler. This fact changes the game quite a bit.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  On the other hand, managing a monetization platform (subscription billing, customer support, linking posts to email to social media notifications) is more complex than self-hosting. Not impossible, but more than most writers would want to take on themselves.
erichocean 4y ago
> Medium is simply YouTube for written content. They wish! Medium is Vimeo.

tonystubblebine 4y ago

I'm the new guy replacing Ev at Medium. I don't think that you can't build a subscription business at Medium. What I told the team internally is that we had a Goldilocks problem where one thing we tried was wrong in one direction and what we're doing now is problematic in a different direction. But I've been publishing on Medium since the beginning and have a pretty good sense of the intersection of quality and Medium's model. What I'm saying is keep an open mind. We grew a pretty large subscription already with a lot still that we can do to make it much higher quality.

__rito__ 4y ago
I quit your platform because you didn't have Partner Program in India. I do not want to monetize my writings anymore, but there was one day, when I did. But your behavior made that impossible. You said once Stripe start working in India, you'd start MPP in India, then they started in Beta. Then you said when Stripe comes out of Beta, you will have MPP in India. Then when Stripe started full-fledged service in India, you stopped mentioning India. This behavior really frustrated me and made me stopped considering Medium seriously for anything. I made good money on Quora in the past. They could send money to India- no problem, but not you guys. I don't want money for my writings now. I want all of them to be free. But I am angry at Medium, and would never be returning.
ok123456 4y ago
can you cool it with the javascript?
hartator 4y ago
Good luck Tony. I've been using Medium as a reader, writer, and subscriber for some years. And nowadays I am unconsciously not using Medium as much in profit of Substack and Ghost. My main draw to Medium as a writer was to reach lot of people. A random paywall means less reach. Not sure if max reach and paywall are reconcilable and solvable.
- socialdemocrat 4y ago
  But you choose yourself if you want to paywall an article. If you don’t like paywall articles then don’t create them. What am I missing?