We need more companies like Medium
Medium made a big announcement yesterday. It was not a feature launch that is going to disrupt an entire industry — as you would expect from a tech company their size. It was the opposite. It was as un-announcement. An un-feature. And it was pretty bold.
Today, Medium’s CEO Ev Williams made a quite intriguing announcement: Medium is taking a few steps back in the direction they were headed to, reducing their team in about one third and eliminating 50 jobs in sales, support, and other business functions.
Hearing about employees being let go is never fun, especially in companies we deeply admire. But there was a lot more to Medium’s announcement:
“We are also changing our business model to more directly drive the mission we set out on originally. While we could continue on our current path — and there is a business case for doing so — we decided that we risk failing on our larger, original mission if we don’t make some proactive changes while we have the momentum and resources to do so.”
The more I dug into the reasons behind their move, the bolder it started to feel.
Every company has a reason to exist in the world
When Medium was founded in 2012, their mission was ambitious: to build a platform that defined a new model for media on the internet. The problem, as they saw it, was that the incentives driving the creation and spread of content were not serving the people consuming it or creating it — or society as a whole.
We see this everyday, especially in the Facebook era. Clickbait-y headlines and content that is built around page views, that will eventually lead to advertising revenue. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other ‘content’ we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals.
“The current system causes increasing amounts of misinformation… And pressure to put out more content more cheaply — depth, originality, or quality be damned. It’s unsustainable and unsatisfying for producers and consumers alike….We need a new model.”
Since then, Medium has been working pretty hard to build a platform that can solve for that. Getting to where they are today, in four years, is a pretty impressive mark. They have quickly become the preferred blogging and content distribution platform of some of the biggest brains, publishers and brands in the world.
But when they got there, they realized they didn’t yet have the right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content. They had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model they were aiming for.
To continue on this trajectory put them at risk — even if they were successful, business-wise — of becoming an extension of a broken system.
The design decisions we make every day
Bringing Medium’s announcement to a smaller scale: this is a good example of design decisions UX Designers and Product Designers have to make every day. When we’re deciding which features to prioritize in our product, one of the most common challenges we have is to balance out the user’s interests with the brand’s interests, to ensure what we are building is both relevant and sustainable from a business perspective.
Now step back for a second and stop thinking in terms of “interests”.
Think about “mission”.
It’s not about choosing the features that are going to bring you the highest short-term value, but choosing the ones that will keep your brand’s values in check — the ones that will give your brand enough runway to achieve their long-term vision. A tough design decision that becomes more and more important in a world bloated of features, services and snowflakes.
Changing direction when you are winning is hard
“In terms of momentum, 2016 was our best year yet. Key metrics, such as readers and published posts were up approximately 300% year on year. And we witnessed important stories published on Medium — from world-famous leaders to unknown individuals — on a daily basis.”
Moving away from the ad-based revenue model was certainly a tough decision for the Medium board, and Ev himself. Advertising is the shortest, safest path to content publishers out there; a proven model that has been working for decades now.
Their decision is probably going to frighten a number of big publishers who moved to Medium attracted by the possibility of an additional, secure revenue stream for their content. Some of them are probably going to move away from the platform until Medium is able to figure out what their new business model will look like.
But changing a company’s direction is also about staying honest to your life’s work. It is about legacy, and the things you are leaving behind as a human being. And sometimes that means sacrificing some of the progress you have made, taking a few steps back to ensure you are working on solving the right challenge — the challenge you really set up for yourself.
About shared beliefs
When Caio Braga and I started blogging about UX, more than ten years ago, we had no idea where this was going to lead us. But we had one clear belief in mind: that at the moment we started trying to monetize — in any form — the content we were sharing with the design community, every single editorial and business decision we made from then on would risk becoming biased. We would start thinking about advertisers and revenue, and not our goals as a design community.
That’s why you don’t see any banner ads here. Or sponsored links in our weekly newsletter. Or posts from brands, agencies, design studios, prototyping software companies or event organizers in our feed. Or why we never accepted free tickets to any design conference, just so we would write about it the day after.
Every day, when we publish something on uxdesign.cc, we’re talking with a pretty smart group of people. Designers who are working their souls off to create something relevant in the world. It wouldn’t make sense to stop them from what they are doing, get their attention (and a few minutes of their day), and then force sponsored content down their throats.
Earlier last year we moved our site to Medium because it would allow us to better connect with our community. It also felt like the right place to preserve our mission and beliefs.
Thank you, Medium, for making us more confident every day about the decision of partnering with you. Thank you, Medium Staff, for being great partners and helping us so much for the time being. Your recent move was not an easy one — but definitely necessary. We don’t know what your future looks like, but we’ll be here, standing our ground. And we’ll fix this broken system together.
