Ask HN: how is Medium doing?

4 points

8 years ago

This week, Medium CEO and founder Evans Williams published two pieces about M's current state of being (1) (2). I found them full of vaguenesses, generalities and open doors. In his last piece, he shared a graph with M's subscriber growth. But the graph is incomplete. It does't show percentages, let alone numbers (and, strangely, was liked on twitter by Marc Andreessen). Is this because subscription numbers are disappointing?

Seems to me that Williams doesn't have a clear path to growth in mind, both in revenue and in subscriptions. Let alone make Medium so big that the VC's, who are looking for companies with stratospheric financial returns, will consider their $132 million investment a financial success.

I like Williams, the man who gave us Blogger and Twitter. But I'm getting increasingly sceptical about Medium. From an N=1 reader's perspective, I might add that I'm seeing less and less people who post their content on Medium. They're staying on their own domains.

What is HN's opinion?

(1) https://medium.com/@ev/the-rationalization-of-publishing-dc001d509de8 (2) https://blog.medium.com/the-medium-model-3ec28c6f603a