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Medium raises $25 million
- speakme 13y agoThe personnel are impressive, and it's a great service, but what is their game plan?
- kevinchen 13y agoRight now, Medium is little more than a nicer looking Blogger. But they are vying for the future of online publishing.
- state 13y agoI guess this is the direct counter-argument to my comment in the thread about Svtle. Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over their content? I find it so strange that these services which are pitched directly at people who consider themselves to be brilliant also become the archive for your stuff. It just seems like a conflict of interest when, yes, what exactly is their game plan?
- lowglow 13y ago> Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over their content? You comment here. Isn't that basically the same thing? What are comments if not for mini-blog posts sometimes.
- minimaxir 13y agoHacker News comments don't require the blood, sweat, and tears involved in writing a 1,000-word well-edited essay. Additionally, Hacker News comments aren't used by the owning website for potential profit. (Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways)
- bhouston 13y ago> Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways Comments are the price some websites pay to encourage higher levels of engagement, and the high level of engagement here on HackerNews makes it a more valuable resource to its readers (more submissions, more voting, and sometimes informed comments from the community) and thus it has a halo effect on YCombinator. Thus the comments in the grand scheme of things are surely a net positive. Reddit and YouTube are built in part on comment driven engagement even if a large majority of the comments are poor.
- atmosx 13y agoI dislike not being able to leave a comment. Yes, I'm outspoken, strong-opinionated and I want to express myself. I liked the HN community before realizing that YCombinator is an incubator, etc. I am/were/came here for the community.
- lowglow 13y ago> Hacker News comments don't require the blood, sweat, and tears involved in writing a 1,000-word well-edited essay. Some people do take the time to write well thought out replies. > Hacker News comments aren't used by the owning website for potential profit. I'm going to disagree. HN profits GREATLY from your participation. > Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways Not likely. Comments from an engaged community (no matter how cynical at times) still drives traffic, and that is a powerful in and of itself.
- untog 13y ago"The HN crowd" has become an online meme for man-child Silicon Valley programmers. So I'd say there is at least a danger of that overflowing to perceptions of YC - just not for anyone YC probably cares about.
- dasil003 13y agoReally? My perception is that "the HN crowd" is known for being pedantic know-it-alls criticizing every minute detail of anything. "Man-child" seems much more Slashdot/Reddit/Digg/4chan plus the rest of the internet.
- blumkvist 13y agoThere's quite a bit of difference between annonymous ramblings in some corner of the internet and long form journalism that took you serious amount of time and money to put together.
- lowglow 13y agotime is money, regardless of how it's spent.
- state 13y agoGood point! My comments are somewhat ephemeral to me. I'm not a very prolific commenter, and I don't feel all that attached to the content. To concede the point in practice, I'll just go for it with a long reply. I do wish comments were somehow a part of my own complete archive though. That seems like it would obviously be better. Although I think the quality of discussion on HN is interesting, it's not that the HN brand is explicitly about the quality of the comments. The writing interface is pretty dissimilar from what Medium offers. To me there there appears to be an obvious conflict: if you're all about attracting brilliant users wouldn't those users also want to retain complete ownership over their content? Isn't that the smart long-term thing to do in a world of quickly changing services? What's especially fascinating to me is the role that design plays in these services. Medium has clearly spent an exceptional amount of money to create a particular user experience. Without commenting on its quality, it seems that the aesthetic they have chosen has almost become a red flag. Spent all our money on design? Don't worry, we're going to sell you out anyway! That should come with the disclaimer that I'm trained as an architect. Design is important, but most important is the tool. In so many cases design is just a way to send messages that distract from the actual workings of the tool.
- dredmorbius 13y agoThe reward for commenting on HN is generally engagement and discussion. I've been casting about myself for a suitable platform. I've actually mostly settled on reddit as it's got a community, some of whom are interested in the topics I am, good search tools, and a serviceable posting infrastructure. Markdown, Imgur for image links, semi-embeddable images with the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and a Wiki for more structured content. I've also got a more traditional blogging platform (Dreamwidth). Since I prefer to operate pseudonymously, self-hosting is not a good fit, though I could do that if I chose. And finding a good mix of platform and tools is tough. As for layout, I've got enough CSS chops that I can shove the more annoying bits of a site out of the way, at least to my preferences. http://dredmorbius.reddit.com/ http://dredmorbius.reddit.com/ http://dredmorbius.dreamwidth.org/ http://dredmorbius.dreamwidth.org/
- chuhnk 13y agoThink of Medium as a new age New York Times. Curation will be done by the general public rather than a paid editing team. Think of the shift of real time news to Twitter. It's basically the same idea for long form journalism. You may disagree at this point in time but given a few years it'll end up being just that.
- trumbitta2 13y agoIf this is really the case, then Medium will be illegal in Italy. You have to be very very wary of how and what you write on your own, personal blog, here. Thanks Silvio.
- tobiasu 13y agoI find the assertion that the general public will curate high quality content pretty amusing. One only needs to look at the front page of reddit or youtube to see what kind of an intellectual world we live in.
- MaybiusStrip 13y agoTwitter became the de-facto source of real-time news because there was no good alternative. Replacing a reputable institution like the NYT is a completely different game. It's not even a good comparison. The NYT is a daily newspaper. The better-written pieces on medium have aspirations closer to what you'd find in The New Yorker or Vice. You have absolutely no precedent for thinking public curation will yield better results than the professionals who work for those institutions. In fact, most of the evidence so far (reddit, digg, etc...) indicates the contrary.
- eob 13y agoIt's a distribution / curation thing, like writing an Op-Ed for a magazine instead of publishing it on your blog. Either way you get the word out, but by ceding control to the magazine you gain access to a wider audience, unless you are in the 1% of bloggers who are a destination themselves (like daringfireball.com). Even Krugman "blogs" via the NYT instead of on his own domain. Both ways are valuable, of course. Just providing the counter argument.
- ThomPete 13y agoThe comparison doesn't hold up quite IMHO. NYT curates much more and so if you manage to get accepted you are more likely to be read. The same as far as I understand is not true for Medium. I have an account there and I am no Krugman.
- eob 13y agoYou're correct, of course. My comment was directed at the question of why someone would share copyright of their written work with an external party. One common answer is the distribution channel and pre-packaged audience. In that respect, NYT and Medium provide similar function.
- mdwrigh2 13y agoMedium sends out an e-mail with hand selected stories every week though and I find myself reading a couple quite often though. That's much less likely to happen with your own blog.
- stephenson 13y agoMost people care about getting readers, get there message out. This is mediums power. Running your own blog and getting readers tend to be harder.
- lowglow 13y agoIt's all about distribution. I agree.
- benihana 13y agoI think people are much less interested in owning the content than they are in having their content promoted. The end goal seems to be internet fame, not having a huge archive of content. When viewed in that light, it makes more sense why people are doing what they're doing.
- steveklabnik 13y ago> Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over their content? Sometimes, it can be good for things. Take parody, for instance. My favorite Medium collection is "CSS Perverts"[1], which is basically really silly, fake articles about programming stuff. Sample article: "How Node.js will replace JavaScript." Because it's on Medium, people are more willing to believe that Jenn is serious, and so she gets confused readers[2], people who are actually quite upset[3], and serious rebuttals[4]. It's one of my favorite things on the internet right now. 1: https://medium.com/cool-code-pal https://medium.com/cool-code-pal 2: https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/cf72b588b1b#ad4c-7315e80e40a4 https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/cf72b588b1b#ad4c-7315e80e40... 3: https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/424683365980069888/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/424683365980069888/p... 4: https://medium.com/p/5133e7296592 https://medium.com/p/5133e7296592
- nl 13y ago"A Call For Web Developers To Deprecate Their CSS"[1] is most awesome thing I've read this year. California Style Sheets are a standard, meaning there is a group of people at W3Schools who come up with new properties (like border-radius and box-shadow) every year. For some time, they did not know that the Node group at W3Schools was coming up with ways to update the styling of a page without CSS. Recently, both groups finally met and realized the overlap in functionality and therefore opened a spec to deprecate CSS entirely. That spec became HTML5. The rest of the story is present day. More and more developers are using HTML5, but do not realize the redundancy of using CSS. [1] https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/1f6430781393 https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/1f6430781393
- voyou 13y agoWait, you're saying Medium is the new http://adequacy.org/ http://adequacy.org/ ? Finally, I understand!
- drawkbox 13y agoI agree writers should have more of an ownership stake but think of writers at large newspapers, journalists etc. Even though they are writing for the brand they are also building their brand. So in a way Medium, Svbtle, etc are all new magazines or papers that are a chance to get noticed more. The smart brand aware writers will use it as another draw. It is a bit like a new 'guest post' combined with writing an article for a third party. But is ev getting rich again off your content a third time? Yes he is a smart man.
- lmm 13y agoI don't consider myself to be brilliant. But I write stuff, I enjoy the writing, and some people seem to enjoy reading it. That's enough. As for being the archive, they're probably more reliable than my hard drive. I'd like my stuff to still be somewhere people can read it, for as long as people enjoy reading it. If medium figure out some way to monetize it, more power to them - it's not like I'm bothering to try. (And if they try to lock the content in a dark dungeon then I trust the internet to jailbreak it)
- misiti3780 13y agoI think mediums UI is nice, but as far as i can tell, you cant include code snippets so its almost useless for blogging about programming - until the change that, I am going to continue to use jekyll.
- goronbjorn 13y agoThey do support code blocks: https://medium.com/help-center/128f049a7ad https://medium.com/help-center/128f049a7ad (just search the page for "Code block")
- nilkn 13y agoIt's pretty limited (e.g., no syntax highlighting) and if you're not careful it will do things like change double quotes (U+0022) to curly quotes (e.g., U+201C and U+201D).
- joeyyang 13y agoThey do support code blocks (cmd-6), but unfortunately, they're not styled in any other way (syntax highlighting, etc.) which makes code blocks somewhat unpleasant to read.
- untog 13y agoI don't think programmers (writing about code) are Medium's main target market.
- misiti3780 13y agoi understand that, but ostracizing a group of people that are probably some of their core users right now (tech community) seems stupid - adding the feature would be very easy
- pseut 13y ago"ostracizing" is a pretty extreme way of putting it.
- 13y ago
- normloman 13y ago"Ideally, Williams envisions Medium much like a magazine creative director, inviting the types of items that may show up in a magazine, from features to top-ten lists to cartoons to even video." Good. The internet needs more top 10 lists.
- rtpg 13y agoTop 10 lists might be the lowest form of journalism but accepting articles as top 10 lists allows us to avoid the "fake article that actually is a top 10 list" situation. A nice price to pay.
- normloman 13y agoOr you could just use human editors with discretion and reject both types of articles.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- seeingfurther 13y agoWhy would a billionaire, proven operator and executor raise a round?
- traskjd 13y agoCould be to get people who he respects around the table looking at it? Nobody is an island and I've see plenty of folks who raise money more to get talent at the higher end (e.g. Atlasssian raised $60m, to get the right people to help it continue growing and assist in the speculated IPO to come).
- js2 13y agoWhich raises the question: Why is Williams taking outside capital at all? Williams, in an interview earlier this week, cited a few reasons: As Medium scales, taking money from multiple investors is a signal of long-term thinking and diversification to the company’s employees; and the more parties that have a stake in Medium outside of Williams, the more they have a stake in the company’s success.
- dclara 13y agoThat's really true. Even if the company has sufficient fund to run by itself, it still needs to go for VC and IPO in order to attract more users, more talent and have a secure exit.
- nedwin 13y agoTo reduce his risk. Now he has a bunch of other smart people who have some skin in the game. They have motivation to help him succeed - which should encourage them to help him grow and eventually to find an exit of some sort. He might be a multi-billionaire but that doesn't mean he's going to throw his money around on 6-packs of rolexes like all the other billionaires.
- shin_lao 13y agoHe's probably building a team.
- staunch 13y agoThe cool thing is Ev is rich enough now to pay back the full $25M personally if he decides to pull another Odeo/Twitter. ...though I imagine most investors will keep their money in play this time :-)
- rabble 13y agoWe didn't have a choice last time.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- choarham 13y agoSo, you can type text into a box and people can comment on it. And it has a nice font. My startup idea is that we sell chairs, but the chairs are nicer than some other chairs and they say 'chair' on them. Can I get $25 million too?
- untog 13y agoSo, you can type text into a box and people can comment on it. Like Facebook, and Twitter, and all those other sites that are clearly and obviously different from each other and come on you're trolling aren't you please tell me you're trolling
- rfnslyr 13y agoI think it's disgusting that such a crap product with no real revenue stream got $25 million. Makes me sick.
- uloweb 13y agoYes, but only if you already have the successful experience with, for example, sofas.
- angersock 13y agopowered by couchdb
- pseut 13y agoSo... you're saying that selling nice chairs is an obviously bad business model?
- angersock 13y agoIt's my understanding that it is hard to find VCs who want to fund chairities.
- coldtea 13y agoWell, if your chairs are indeed "nicer than some other chairs", then you probably can.
- winslow 13y agoDoes medium have any current revenue stream or any plans for revenue?
- look_lookatme 13y agoOh they are definitely going to advertise is some form or another.
- pearjuice 13y agoJust like Twitter heh.
- af3 13y agoIf only medium would produce something...other than blog posts...
- dclara 13y agoSame type of questions: what's the difference from other blogging sites? What's the business model? Maybe because of its huge user base? I think all these questions have already been answered though.
- lmm 13y agoEven if medium is never anything more than tumblr with clearer design and restricted to plain text, that will still be a valuable thing.
- dclara 13y agoI like the style and my blog is using the similar style with text only with RWD (Responsive Web Design) I learned from other people. http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ But that's not the only value there. I guess a lot of people like to post their blogs on Medium which gives a sort professional taste. But I think blog.com and wordpress.com are also very good sites. I'm just curious about the evaluation from the investors point of view. A service website may not value that much because they don't have a real product. User base may change over night.
- suyash 13y agoAre we in a bubble or what.
- mesozoic 13y agoMost of the posts on medium are so poorly written or blatantly false I just avoid the whole domain now. So in my eyes they have a lot of work to do to fix their branding.
- prezjordan 13y agoHa yeah, google indexes a lot of false content too so I avoid it.
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoI'm with you on this. In my eyes it's the "Experts Exchange" of our time.
- primitivesuave 13y agoAt least they made the good decision of avoiding a domain name containing a hidden sexual innuendo.
- talles 13y agoYou had me @ "Experts Exchange". Nice comparison.
- wyck 13y agoA closed source, curated and content ceded blog platform, ..is this a sign that the internet has come full circle..again
- kevando 13y agoPretty sure that happened when Yahoo! paid 990 million for the new Geocities
- atmosx 13y agoMy deficit for being European: How the hell are expecting the investors to make money out of this?!?!?!
- GuiA 13y agoMost likely acquisition.
- mathattack 13y agoGreat for them. I'm curious - how much of this is based on the quality of the service, versus the quality of the founders?