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- Medium’s Rise
Medium’s Rise
I am curious about this phenomenon. Medium is a blogging platform, right? How has it raised over 100 million dollars?
And this is from a Twitter person. Have we not learned the lesson that a successful platform does not make a successful company?
The Wikipedia article says:
That’s the vision? To have content that’s not as short as 140 characters? That’s like saying you have an idea for a hamburger place, and the gimmick is to not have the hamburgers be too salty.
To be clear, I actually love Medium’s interface. It’s design. It’s clean. Mad respect.
But that means all content looks (and feels) the same. And all the content is owned by Medium.
Besides, you can have similar clean looks via themes in any CMS.
So I ask again: what is the draw? And how can people expect it to last?
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I’m not being rhetorical here. I’m honestly trying to figure out what I’m missing.
Are they really solving a problem that WordPress and other platforms have not solved? Or are there just lots of occasional bloggers who are easily tricked into thinking that their platform is the problem, and therefore jump from place to place.
Maybe it’s not just the platform. Maybe their marketing and pushing of the content is what’s making them so powerful. Maybe it’s all about amplifying the content they do get there.
But that still leaves the issue of the content not belonging to who created it. It’s all Medium’s content, is it not?
I just don’t see how this is sustainable. Not just for Medium, but for any company that wants all content to look the same, and to be owned by them.
It seems like that can only go on for a limited time before people decide they don’t like that mix.
Somebody educate me on the Medium phenomenon. I need it.