Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.
Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Medium, published a post titled “Renewing Medium’s Focus” which discussed big changes for the CMS. Since ad driven revenue and long form content are some issues that may interest WordPressers, I thought I’d take a minute to discus the future of Medium.
Love WordPress News but hate reading think pieces? This is Doc Pop’s news drop.
Forbes magazine recently published an article titled “How WordPress Ate The Internet in 2016” which shared how 25% of the internet is powered by WordPress. With over 75 million sites using it.
Despite WordPress’s dominance, it often gets compared to smaller content management services, like Medium. Which has found a way to combine long form articles with a social media kind of community.
Ev Williams, the CEO of Medium and co-founder of Twitter, just published a post titled “Renewing Medium’s focus” which gives us a glimpse into Medium’s future.
The article starts off by announcing Medium has recently layed off about a third of it’s workforce, that’s about 50 people, in it’s sales and support departments.
Ev then mentions plans to change Medium’s business model to more directly drive their original mission, but he doesn’t get into specifics in the article.
Medium’s original premise was to fix the issue of blog writers need to cranking out shorter and shorter pieces rather than writing out more thoughtful content. The goal was to provide an audience as well as a revenue model for long-form writing. Though in 2016 Medium began selling it’s first ad services, in order to attract more mainstream publishers to use it’s service.
In retrospect, Ev states that move took Medium away form it’s focus and, even if successful, would result in “becoming an extension of a broken system.”
In terms of numbers, it sounds like 2016 was a good growth year for Medium, but they are still struggling to make a sustainable product. Though there aren’t any specifics mentioned, I actually hope that Medium succeeds in finding “a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people.” because that sounds like the same thing every other CMS, including WordPress, could benefit from.
What are your predicitons for Medium in 2016? Let us know in the comments on on Twitter at @thetorquemag. We’ll see you next week!
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