Will Medium Fail In 2024?

Why 2024 might be Medium's last year..

Wow! Here we sit on January 2, 2024.

2024 marks an incredible 9 years since I first published on Medium.com, the website I owe my entire livelihood to.

If it weren’t for Medium, I wouldn’t be here writing to you now.

I write this newsletter because 2024 is going to be massive for Medium—good or bad.

This summer it will be two years since Tony Stubblebine became Medium’s CEO. I remember initially being very excited at the prospect of Tony Stubblebine taking over Medium. I felt Ev Williams, while brilliant, was way too elitist in his thinking of what “quality” writing was on the internet. He opted for hiring ex Journalists and Editors at some of the countries biggest publications to come in and create in-house Medium content, then he pushed that content down our throats every day on Medium’s homepage.

A few years after he did this, Ev announced he was laying off basically everybody he’d hired to create these in-house publications because they weren’t driving the revenue he’d expected.

Tony came in and decided to double down on this elitist thinking by making a select few Medium publications “boost nominators.”

“Boost hoobie whatty Tom?” I hear you asking.

Boost nominators are people who can nominate certain stories for a “boost” in Medium’s algorithm. Their nominations get sent to an internal team inside Medium who decide what content gets boosted and when.

Editors nominate.
Boosters select which stories go viral.

Bada bing bada boom.

The Medium “boost” program is basically the same thing Ev was doing years ago.

An internal team at Medium decides what content goes viral on the platform.

I don’t understand how Tony and company think this is actually going to work, seeing how his predecessor basically did the exact same thing and it failed miserably.

In November I asked my email list of 5,000 people what they thought of Medium’s future.

• 50% said Medium was going downhill.

• 20% said Medium was moving in the right direction.

• 30% basically said “Meh.”

I don’t know, these are not super incredible results if you asked me.

In November my Medium earnings got cut by 2/3 despite no change in view counts. That was, to put it mildly, quite a shock. If this happened for me, it probably happened for a LOT of other writers as well.

And what’s all this I hear about Medium’s new expensive membership plan?

The “Friend of Medium” plan or whatever?

Basically they got everybody to pay 4x more money for the same crap is what I heard. The only benefit you get is that you can share stories with your friends and they can read them for free.

I’m sorry, but this REEKS to me of desperation.

This is basically Medium saying “We’re having a hard time finding new members so we’ll charge our existing mega fans 4X more money to make up for it.

It also seems they’re admitting the content on their platform isn’t worth the $5 per month fee they charge. I mean, they made a plan where readers can send these locked stories to their friends so they can read them for free.

Shouldn’t good writing, if it were actually worth it, drive people to subscribe on its face? Why do we need to give people free trials of great content to entice them to subscribe?

I don’t need to drive a Porsche to understand why it’s expensive. I can see it from a mile away that it’s a special vehicle.

And this gets back to my earlier discussions in this newsletter about whether a subscription-based business model is even viable for Medium in the first place.

I mean, Medium’s been banging their head against the wall with this setup since 2017.

I remember getting emails from Medium in 2019 telling me how much money the biggest writers in the partner program were making. I mean, I heard they were making upwards of $10,000-$20,000+ per month. That’s insane.

Now? I don’t hear about any of that in Medium’s blast emails.

It’s hard for me to say this, but I just don’t think the content on Medium is worth paying for in the eyes of online readers. I mean, if it’s not worth it for them to pay a measly $5 per month for it, then maybe this whole freaking industry is severely overvalued, and we need to come to terms with that.

Maybe most people don’t want to pay a subscription to read words.

On Substack you can lock content, communities, courses, lessons, group calls, etc. behind the paywall. On Medium? Just your words.

And I feel like it’s just not enough for people.

2024 is arguably the most important year in Medium’s history.

This is a huge make or break year, and watching Medium continually underwhelm me with new updates, features, and products WHILE the creators in my audience lose more and more faith in the viability of the platform make me worry this could be the nail in the coffin of a platform that gave me and so many other writers so much in the 2010’s.

Add in that November was the worst performance I had in the partner program of all time, and I got to say.. I think 2024 will spell doom for Medium once and for all.

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