While it's normal for a CEO to focus on engagement statistics and whether the company focused on the right way to monetize, Medium is also read by quite a lot o

While it's normal for a CEO to focus on engagement statistics and whether the company focused on the right way to monetize, Medium is also read by quite a lot of technical and professional folks, and the pain points I encountered are: 1. Paywalls. Some people don't mind. Make it obvious in the link itself that this blog is monetized. I want to know if it's worth navigating away from what I am doing right now. 2. Site it slow. Ask yourself why did Medium scraper websites (that strip tracking) had to come into existence. If the market actively tries to circumvent you then it means you are not in connection with the users who you would want to spend time on Medium. This Silicon Valley mentality of "extract money, we'll think of performance maybe one day next century" is driving away the professional users who would pay for your service. 3. Too much trackers (likely related to #2). If that's your monetization model then the business is already on its way out. You can do a lot with Medium. You can be the specialized Facebook for small club of readers and authors. You can help people organize events. You can provide a platform for book writers to draft and store chapters. You can put a paywall like "early access to my book's new chapter", too. These things are not what drives insanely huge engagements that investors love but they absolutely will be bringing some money. This hyper-growth mindset has to go. There are good ways to make money and not make your product suck. I loved the idea of Medium when it first came out and consumed it a lot. For no less than two years now though, I use various scrapers and read stuff ad-free and tracker-free. Think of why it has came to it.