Medium: Opportunities and Challenges

Medium aspires to be the best place to read and write articles. While I’m optimistic about the future of Medium given how great the product is, there are some critical factors that Evan Williams and the company needs to watch out for.

The online publishing space is fairly fragmented and all the publishers are engaged in a zero sum game: user’s attention. The space comprises of paid content providers (newspapers, journals, magazines, etc.), celebrity writers (politicians, sportsmen, actors, etc.), professional publishers, independent bloggers / opinion providers and others. Medium's simple and standard design along with an  unbiased ranking algorithm is a strong competitive advantage. On the flip side, a small user base (~25 Million; small relative to other social networks) along with a significant reliance on other social media sites for traffic is a watch-out for the company. To achieve its vision, Medium must find a way to increase its share of direct traffic.

An important aspect of growth for Medium is diversity of publishers so that it appeals to more users globally. Currently, most of the opinions and posts come from tech and media elite. There is a huge opportunity to partner with and empower professional publishers through Medium. As Evan and his leadership team thinks about growing globally, it’ll be really important to get adoption from writers across the globe from different countries, languages, etc.  Also, to ensure reader engagement in the long term, Medium needs to find a way to scale up while maintaining quality standards.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, getting the monetization strategy right for the company and publishers is going to be the key for Medium. As they bring more professional publishers onboard, they’ll need to show value to the advertisers quicker, to keep the professional publishers engaged.

Recommendations: Medium has gathered some momentum since inception (25 million + visitors and some paid content) to begin the transition towards being a platform.

In the short term, Medium can continue with its current model with free access to the non-paid content. As an add-on feature, Medium can partner with some paid content providers and create a sling box like service by bundling paid content. This will create additional value for the readers – access to more paid content without having to pay for each service individually, and more value for publishers – more readers; thereby expanding the pie for both parties. A sling box like service serves as an experiment (low risk) with minimal disruption to the loyalists but attracting new users from the lone-standing paid content providers.

In the long term, once Medium has a significant reader population (thereby higher negotiation power with paid content providers), they can add a Spotify like service i.e. aggregate all paid content and monetize using a monthly subscription model.