This Medium Platform Needs a New Mission Statement — A Suggestion

And a higher barrier to entry wouldn’t go amiss

According to Comparably.com, the most compensated executive at Medium earns $790,000 annually.

It takes 31,600 membership fees to pay the CEO’s wages — is there anything left to share with the writers?

What is it like to work at Medium?

There is an overview of how the employees score their company culture and their leadership when Ev Williams was in charge.

They state they are, ‘building the best place on the internet for words: a place where today’s smartest thinkers, experts, and storytellers can share big, interesting ideas.’

A grandiose goal. How is that working out?

Medium’s mission

“Medium’s mission is to deepen readers’ understanding of the world and to empower writers to share their best work and biggest ideas.”

There are writers here who share their work with exacting standards. Advice and learning abound. On Medium, we increase the depth of our knowledge, learn useful tips, and read some big cheese ideas.

They regale us with personal, heartfelt stories. We learn about people and their aspirations. What they love or hate, their successes and their tragedies.

Medium rewards its writers. We can earn money from writing and a few writers are hitting the bullseye. But there is a disconnect between Medium’s mission and its results.

Because barriers to entry are so low and money is involved, there are many more writers who are firing salvo after salvo hoping an article hits the target. It’s a gamification of the system.

There are writers hiding under pseudonyms. Profiles are manipulated, and people profess to be someone they are not. There are writers with multiple accounts. There is guile and subterfuge. And there are plagiarists.

I gained a follower. As always, I checked his profile and had a look to see if what he had written interested me. He’d posted fifteen articles that day. Five were submitted within an hour of each other.

I raised an eyebrow. Even Tim Denning isn’t that prolific.

One of his articles had three comments — three people accusing him of plagiarism, including the author of the article:

“This is my article that I wrote. You uploaded my article WORD for WORD behind a paywall. This is plagiarism and it’s digusting.”

There are people using artificial intelligence to do their writing for them. Copyrighting bots are on the increase and are being used by some to churn out drab articles at speed.

The average Medium writer is not empowered to share their best work and biggest ideas. The average Medium writer is sharing their average work, on average. That’s the law of averages for you.

I include myself in that.

When I read my early submissions to Medium, I cringe. I had to learn. I used Medium as a tool to improve my writing. I learned from other writers and I learned from the super-fast feedback.

Where else can you post your writing and have people consistently comment and clap within days, or even hours?

Medium provides ongoing detailed stats for your writing. You can look back at your writing and see what works and what doesn’t.

Medium has its problems

Medium has had to let go of staff. They’ve changed their CEO and we get little or no feedback about the company and its financial status. Will it be around five years from now? It’s hard to predict.

As slight changes creep in, there seems to be a growing disharmony.

In the halcyon days of Medium (2019) an up-and-coming writer posted an article and received 75k claps and 554 comments.

Today that writer has nearly 300k followers. A week ago, he published an article and so far it has only received 1k claps and 26 comments.

Is this the law of diminishing returns? Is this the relational model at work?

Is it to be expected?

People learn what works and they receive a bit of the pie. But if the pie isn’t growing, there is less to go around.

If a top writer sells a course on how to succeed on Medium, they have to expect at least some of their students to make a success of Medium.

I’ve been dredging Medium and finding some top-notch writers. People who had tens of thousands of followers but have posted nothing for a year or two.

Why would a top writer give up a lucrative income stream? Some haven’t been quiet quitting, they are bemoaning Medium and buggering off to pastures new — after 10 years at the helm, Ev Williams has gone.

Others are threatening to leave.

Yet, Medium is a thriving platform in terms of reader engagement, writer involvement and opportunity.

Opportunity

Medium gives writers the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, find their voice, receive feedback, and build relationships. They get to showcase their writing, share the wonders of their knowledge, and learn life-changing information.

As a reader, $5 per month represents excellent value. As a writer, it is a ridiculously cheap way of honing their craft. If this was where you bought your clothes, it would be in between shopping at a bargain basement store and shoplifting.

Let readers read for $5 per month, but make the fee for all writers commensurate with the opportunity. And if that means some earn more, all good and well.

Rather than changing the way Medium works to fit its mission statement, it would be better to change the mission statement.

I thought about it and I don’t think it needs to change all that much. The emphasis should be on learning and development, I suggest:

“Medium’s mission is to deepen readers’ understanding of the world and to empower writers to learn to write their best work and develop big ideas.”

Malky is a lifelong learner, and he finds journeying is a damn good way to cement his knowledge.

There’s more by Malky here. Get an email when Malky publishes. Read and learn, write and earn by joining here.

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