Ah Medium. Ignoring the technical and business issues caused by ever heavier pages, unavoidable paywalls, etc, the main reason it failed was simple: Because it

Ah Medium. Ignoring the technical and business issues caused by ever heavier pages, unavoidable paywalls, etc, the main reason it failed was simple: Because it attracted an audience that didn't care for quality, and saw blogging as a 'get rich quick' scheme. And that's something that tends to happen whenever a service provides a way to 'monetise' user created content without any sort of quality filter. The people who write/make content about things they care about get flooded out by folks jumping on the bandwagon and trying to get to make easy money. Hence all the vapid lifestyle garbage and beginner tutorials for basic tech topics and political rants and whatever else. The folks writing them didn't have anything meaningful to say, but wanted to become full time bloggers making money on the internet. You can see this in a lot of fields in general too. Amazon lowered the requirements for selling there, so it became flooded with dropshippers and questionable companies selling dubious or counterfeit products. YouTube allows you to make money from your work, so in addition to all the great creators, you see a lot of scammers, thieves and people trying to make a quick buck from controversy content. See also Steam (with lots of asset flips and questionably done games), the iOS and Android app stores and (in real life) Airbnb. As for why Medium failed when the others didn't on a finacial level/popularity level? Because unfortunately, it's really hard to get people to pay for text based content, and (fortunately) equally hard to get authors to stick with your platform when it goes to crap. YouTube sticks around because it's free and videos take up a lot of disc space, bandwidth, etc. The app stores and most gaming ones stick around because it's often the only way for users of those products to play your games/use your apps, at least without a decent amount of technical knowledge and jailbreaking. Amazon has a kick ass logistics network and brand recognition on par with Google or Facebook (and running your own online shop is more finicky/expensive than hosting blog posts). What exactly does Medium have? Not much, hence all the folks who genuinely care about what writing can (and did) go elsewhere, whereas the folks who want easy money still cling to it like a lottery ticket that might potentially work out in some universe or another.