The Bizarre Self-Inflicted Wounds of Medium.com
How a blogging giant cannibalizes itself and questions about Medium's future.
The secret’s out.
And so is Evan Williams, longtime CEO of Medium.com.
On July 12th, Medium announced that Tony Stubblebine would replace Ev Williams as the company's new CEO. Over the last decade, with Williams at the helm, Medium has gone through a turbulent series of ups and downs, dozens of pivots, and a lot of uncertainty in the process.
Part of working for a tech startup is expecting to eat raw chaos for breakfast.
But Medium took things to a whole other level.
This was partly thanks to Ev Williams’ vision—it kept shifting. Casey Newton published an excellent overview of Medium’s quest for a sense of purpose, listing more than a dozen sudden changes in the company between 2013 and 2022.
It was a partial list.
Rather than beat the same well-worn path that others have, I’ll offer a brief backstory before I move on to precisely how Medium signed its own death warrant.
The History
Over the last decade, Medium tried everything from running ads to subscription models. They were among the first companies to ditch ads and embrace subscriptions.
They’ve attempted supporting small-time independent writers and journalists like we see on Substack, and they’ve tried their hand at becoming a mainstream publishing outlet.
In 2019, they launched in-house brands like OneZero and Elemental with highbrow journalists and professional editors, attempting to become a top-shelf publisher and not just another blog site. These were Medium’s proprietary publications.
They paid good money for great content.
The plan was simple: hire noteworthy journalists and prestigious editors, pay them well, and let quality draw an audience willing to pay the paltry membership fee of $5 per month to continue to read excellent content.
But Medium’s hopes didn’t come to pass.
In early 2021, Medium dissolved paid publications and, over time, withdrew their funding. Some felt that this was the death of Medium.com.
But we have a long way to go down the rabbit hole.
What We Miss
Let’s rewind.
On August 28th, 2020, Ev announced that Medium was shifting (again!) away from what Ev described as a “transactional” model and toward a “relational” model.
Ev said:
Navigating from homepage to homepage — the digital equivalent of picking up a magazine — feels very antiquated and inefficient when the headlines can all be aggregated and presented to you, personalized. Or, depending on your need, when you can search for a specific topic and be led directly to a reasonable set of answers by the authority of Lord Google.
The vision was bold, and I applaud it.
It encompassed what we now think of today when we think of Substack.
Creators building longstanding relationships of trust with their audiences, rather than one-shot, click-and-bounce transactions of attention for dollars or ad revenue. In this respect, Mr. Williams was an absolute visionary.
But that vision wouldn’t deliver.
With this shift, Ev went to war with the gatekeepers.
Continuing, he said:
Efficiency is great. And it’s also the inevitable result of the explosion of outlets (down to the individual blog) that the internet has enabled. The relatively limited number of outlets and the gatekeepers who controlled them in the pre-internet world let a very small number of perspectives be heard.
In other words, Ev envisioned a world where bloggers (more importantly, ideas) weren’t so dependent on SEO and search engines, like “Lord Google” to thrive. His bravery and foresight are laudable, even if his execution failed miserably.
He envisioned Substack. He delivered Medium.
A year later, Medium sputtered. It began to decay and slowly die.
I know exactly when. I know exactly why.
It all makes you wonder, can a platform succeed without search engines?
The Crash of 2021
I’ve spoken to countless Medium creators, and we agree on one thing: Medium really began to sink in the late-summer, early-autumn of 2021.
Let’s call it the crash of 2021.
It felt like the floor bottomed out on us.
Diverse creators in various niches, from the raw, candid tell-it-all bloggers like Shannon Ashley to the productivity bloggers like Tom Keugler and Tim Denning, everyone felt a sudden shift.
Traffic died.
One creator who spoke on the condition of anonymity was making $8,000 per month writing for the platform full time. They’ve since dropped to $2,000 per month while churning out more content than before the crash:
Things took a dramatic drop for me in August 2021 and continued to plummet. It was right about the time they ran that contest.
Another big-name creator said:
That's when the numbers started dropping, but I feel like the decline started before that.
Since then, Medium’s creators have collectively held their breath, hoping for a return of the old Medium. They’ve whispered in Slack groups, and Facebook chats about the possibility that the Medium gods decided to change the algorithm to conspire against them.
If a platform is only good as its content and content is only as good as the spirit of the creators who create it, where does that leave Medium?
The Downward Spiral
The platform’s creators have felt a growing sense of hopelessness as the years passed, and they find themselves publishing lower and lower quality articles rapid-fire with increasingly withering results. The returns diminished for Medium’s creators.
This has created a catch-22, where independent creators increase the speed of their output at the expense of quality the same amount of money they were before.
Quality drops, paying subscribers leave—a vicious cycle began.
From summer of 2021 to summer of 2022, we’ve waited for things to get better.
June 23rd, 2022, big-time Medium writer, Tom Kuegler, wrote in his candid autopsy of a dying platform titled Why I’ve Stopped Writing on Medium:
Since summer 2021, Medium’s cannonball into the pool of obscurity gained speed. Publications like P.S. I Love You, The Ascent, and The Post-Grad Survival Guide all disappeared from the platform within months.
The Timeline of a Platform Crash
Let’s put it all in order.
August 28th, 2020: Ev announces a shift away from “transactional” media and toward “relational” media, moving away from searching and clicking headlines and toward relationships.
On February 11th, 2021, workers at Medium.com began unionizing.
On March 1st, 2021, Medium fell one vote short of unionizing. Unproven accusations of union-busting abounded.
On March 23rd, 2021, Ev Williams posted the gloomily-titled Medium Editorial Team Update. It’s both sterile and heartbreaking. He announced that Medium wasn’t seeing the subscription numbers increase from these large publications in a way he’d hoped. With this, he did away with the large, in-house publications like OneZero and offered buyouts to the staff, laying off many Medium employees with one swipe.
Take a look at this. It’s Medium’s traffic from search engines over time. In March, right after the announcement of the dissolution of large publications, you see a dip in traffic begin.
Medium loses about 20 million monthly visitors from keyword-driven searches, according to SEMRush.
Here’s a closer look. It’s total web traffic from Google:
This is the exact time creators “felt” the great crash of 2021.
If you “felt” that shift, I have to say, it looks like the numbers confirm your suspicions.
According to SerpStat, a company that gives us web traffic analyses, search engine traffic to Medium.com (from Google) halved between August 2021 and September 2021.
Half!
It dropped from 160 million visitors from to 80 million visitors.
I don’t think Ev intended to take on “Lord Google” quite like this, but it was a consequence of Medium abandoning the paid publications that were driving much of the platform’s traffic.
Here’s a full view of Medium’s Google traffic so you can see how drastic the fall was:
Medium’s Self-Immolation
“How did this happen?” you may be wondering.
Simple: keywords.
It’s no secret Medium has long had problems with search engines. In 2019, long before the Great Crash, we see writers talking about how poorly Medium indexes in search engines.
In simple terms, this means that search engines like “Lord Google” can’t check the quality of Medium’s content. Google uses AI to periodically check out Medium’s pages to make sure the site is running smoothly.
Certain types of paywalls can mess up this process (though not all of them). And the fact that Medium treats its comments as if they were whole, new articles messes up the AI of search engines like Google.
When Google goes to check out Medium’s pages to test its legitimacy, it gets denied.
Before the Great Crash, Medium already had some strikes against it. It was on Google’s naughty list. It wasn’t getting any presents for Christmas long before 2021.
In 2020, Onely ran a piece talking about how Medium a ton of organic visibility thanks to “homepage cloaking,” the process I just described.
This doesn’t explain the sudden precipitous nosedive in traffic from search engines, the Great Crash of 2021.
But this does:
These are mostly Medium’s in-house publications. To the right, there’s a list of organic keywords, a vital driver of web traffic from search engines.
Translation: the in-house publications that Medium pulled the plug on in March 2021 were driving the vast majority of the platform’s search engine traffic.
A few months later, this resulted in a precipitous decline that’s continued ever since.
Autopsies on the Living
When Ev announced pulling the plug on these in-house publications, he said they weren’t creating the conversion to paying subscribers he’d hoped. Which leaves us with several questions.
Can Medium survive without shelling out tons of money to big-name journalists? Does it have a purpose that can be made profitable? Or can publications be made profitable while maintaining quality?
Now that Medium is one year into its shift toward smaller, independent publishers who were driving new subscriptions, according to Ev, how can Medium raise the quality of the content back to the level it once enjoyed? Independent publishers translates to a step-down in quality in most cases. How can Medium reconcile this?
Is it too late for Medium to change the way it allows search engines to index its site? Is it too late to turn back from going against the grain of the “gatekeepers” of “Lord Google” and more?
The new CEO, Tony Stubblebine, sure has his work cut out for him. The answer might be found in returning to Medium publications as a form of quality control, supposing that can be done in a way that’s not cost-prohibitive.
Many independent writers started up their own publications, like Mind Café and Post-Grad Survival Guide, with these publications generating considerable followings that rivaled the others.
Could these be viable alternatives?
These publications closed up shop by choice once Medium withdrew their funding. Can they be brought back in such a way that mends Medium’s search engine woes? Is that the direction Medium should ultimately take itself?
So many questions remain.
Medium isn’t dead quite yet, but it’s on life support; its wounds are self-inflicted.
Hopefully Mr. Stubblebine has just what it takes to resuscitate it and bring a once-vibrant platform back to life.
I love Medium and hope to see it thrive.
Thanks for reading. Subscribe below and if you don’t mind, please check out my Substack publication, The Science of Sex, that seeks to explore the nuances of human sexuality through the power of science.
Thank You for all the details, Joe. I needed some guidance on what to do next and this helped me a lot, like always.