Must-Read: Ben Thompson: What is Medium Doing?
Must-Read: I had written, apropos of Medium: “I keep hoping that someone like Ben Thompson will write a dazzling piece on his daily newsletter to make everything clear to me.”
Lo and behold! Ben Thompson delivers!
What a strange new world, that has such people the ability to order up on whim a 2000-word essay from one of keenest of analysts exactly prepared to write on exactly the topic I am curious about in it!
: What is Medium Doing?: “There are a huge number of publishers on the Internet….
…I believe [Medium’s] goal is to collate…. If the company can get the long tail to publish on their platform… a massive amount of really crappy posts… a not-insignificant number of really compelling pieces… from a theoretically endless supply of authors… if edited and curated properly… a very compelling stream of content…. Medium is suddenly a big publisher with an attractive proposition for advertisers….
That’s part one: the other part is… publisher of choice for the future John Grubers or Ben Thompsons… hosting, design, ad sales, subscription management… efficiently done at scale…. I do think this type of blogging has a bright future, but for now… [largely] inaccessible…. A platform that handles everything but the writing could make this path much more accessible…. It’s a vision I’m really excited about, particular the last segment….
That said, success is by no means assured…. [The] elephant in the room…. Facebook’s… redesign of its blog-like Notes tool… is now rolling out… [with] a design that will look familiar to anyone who has ever read a post on Medium…. The most potential readers are on Facebook. The most potential writers are on Facebook. Advertisers are on Facebook…. Facebook isn’t just the long tail, it’s the entire damn curve…. Notes is simply another piece of Facebook’s efforts to colonize the entire Social-Communication map. The company already mostly killed… blogging… because… most blog posts were little more than status updates, links, or photos. Notes is simply coming for the essays.