An Interview With Medium’s New CEO, Tony Stubblebine

What’s next for Medium?

Sinem Gunel, a popular Medium writer and writing coach, interviewed Medium’s newly appointed CEO on a live call. This interview may offer some answers for all the Medium writers and readers wondering what the next chapter about Medium will bring.

Tony Stubblebine has been a part of the Medium community for 10 years. He launched and grew three large, successful publications on Medium: Better Humans, Better Marketing, and Better Technology.

If I could summarize his advice to writers in one phrase, it is “write with a book in mind.” You can read more about that below.

Please note that the responses here are not quotes, but paraphrased from the interview.

How many people are behind-the-scenes at Medium?

There are 111 remote employees. They are clustered in San Franciso, New York, LA, Paris.

What is your job?

My job is to set a strategy and make sure people are aligned with it. This will help authors understand what we’re looking for. We will talk about author incentives, the product and how distribution works. Of course, we will also work on recruiting, hiring, managing, and ensuring that people grow in their careers. Sometimes my role is to be the face of the company as it is in this interview.

How would you describe Medium to someone brand new to the platform? What is the core purpose of the platform?

Our purpose is to spread great ideas and great information. Medium is about having constructive conversations, building people up, and helping people become a better version of themselves.

Where do you see the biggest potential for Medium? What is the best case scenario?

I interviewed on a theory of focus. Our base is about supplying good, free, publishing tools. Medium should provide the easiest way to publish online. People should know this is a good place to blog for both individuals and companies.

The other piece is the partner program. Readers are willing to pay for great information, ideas and writing. If you offer great information it is life-changing. You don’t have to get a computer science degree to do programming. You can get all that information online and Medium can be a main resource.

What do you mean when you say “Think about your writing as if you’re creating a book”? How does this increase the quality of the work on the platform.

I’ve seen so many people make careers after writing a book.I wrote a book about a programming topic I didn’t know a lot about. After six months of research, I turned it in to the publisher and I was an expert in the topic. When you focus on a topic, you have the ability to be one of the smartest people in the world on that topic. People write to advance their careers by improving their portfolios. Learning something new to learn it better yourself and give back is also a reason to write.

“Write with a book in mind,” means creating a well-researched body of work. If you want to be a researcher and be at the same level as professionals, you have to be willing to do a massive amount of research.

What does better writing mean?

The best writing comes from people who know what they’re talking about.

Think about where the money comes from. It’s from the subscribers and it allows us to pay authors. I think of it through that lens of our 105 topics: how do we help the readers? We need to raise the quality bar.

In Better Humans, we want first-hand information from experts. You are an expert in your own experience and an expert if you’ve been trained in a topic.

What about the people who don’t consider themselves experts? These people include poets, fiction writers, and writers who write on a wide variety of topics?

This goes to the question of what it takes to get distribution. We offer an open publishing platform for everyone. There are people who write on a variety of topics who are experts on writing. Maybe you want to write about psychology or neuroscience, but if you look at it from a subscriber perspective, do they want to hear from you, given that we already have a community of psychologists and neuroscientists. How we accomplish that is tricky.

What about writers who are just getting started?

This is a great place for people who want to write and publish. But they may not be ready to be compensated for it. For people trying to climb the ladder, rather than just express themselves, I suggest submitting to publications where you can get feedback when they are not accepted, which may simply be to review the guidelines carefully.

What will happen to your publications?

I think Medium will acquire and run the publications.

Can you create an incentive structure where writers are paid for external traffic? That’s not possible now with a membership model.

The authors that bring in external readers grow the pie for all of us so they should be the most highly rewarded authors.

I’m very interested in SEO and want us to pay more for external traffic. I’ve bookmarked all the articles about better marketing tools and tactics. SEO means you write the definitive answer to something.

I’ve been looking into how valuable certain types of traffic are, and I need to learn about this before determining the incentives for external incentives. I haven’t put that on the roadmap yet.

How are you planning to keep the conversation going with readers and writers?

I’m chatty and like to talk to people. In my announcement post, I responded to many people who commented. I will continue to write about my process because I like the feedback, so follow me for more. I will read the comments and respond publicly to many of them.

How are curation decisions made? What is it good for and what should people pay attention to?

Someone said they get curated and it doesn’t seem to matter. My question is why are so many stories getting curated and why do we have so many gaps? We have to dig into that.

The number one feature request is why we can’t edit on the app. How will you address that, and what happened?

The backstory was that it had more to do with a practical matter and a misunderstanding about how valuable it is. I spoke with my product team yesterday, and they said it was possible to put it back in. I expect it will come back, but it will take time to get it right.

To read and write as much as you want on Medium, you may join using my link: https://ilana221.medium.com/membership