What Is Medium?

Captain’s Log: What we’ve learned so far …

When I came to Medium from Facebook, I imagined that all these hives were magazines. When I was a staffer on a magazine produced with typewriters and printing presses, I would think, “The only big problem in publishing is distribution.” Now anybody can distribute anything with a click, yet there is the same problem. Making something available is not really distribution, though it can provide the illusion of distribution.

Post office boxes, deposit boxes, and Medium Magazines are hive structures.

When Adelia Ritchie started up, “Open Kimono,” she made me an editor, which suggested we might decline some writers. We did decline a couple of writers, but we also ran almost everything. I think Adelia turned away a couple of people, and I rejected something because it was insipid, but most everyone joined the hive.

The point was to grow the hive

I wasn’t here very long before I realized these are not magazines, they are blog collectors. As with Facebook, the content is the product, so the company isn’t producing anything. They are providing administrative services for writers, who pay an administrative fee for those services. With Facebook the payment is your data. Medium is direct payment.

So, the first level is that you write a blog, and then you send it to somebody who will group it with other blogs. Some of them are exclusive groups and some of them are just glad you can write. The fact is, though, that people who write, know how to write, because they’ve practiced. But they don’t know what to do with what they write. They need a strategy to build up a readership.

Medium Magazines are mostly begun by writers who look at how other writers are expanding their readership from scratch by becoming a core (magazine) for other writers, who will become a hive. Medium is a proliferation of these hives, as writers start magazines and invite in other writers, who start their own hives. An outer shell, a corporate structure, contains this multi-cellular organism fueled by people who write because they want to communicate.

Most people will never get what you write because they aren’t in the distribution network. As I understand it, a bot chooses what goes into a bigger distribution network. To me that means there is a formula, so if you know the formula you can write to it. Writing like that might make money but it’s as interesting as folding laundry.

To most effectively use Medium as a social connection, one need not write at all, just read other people. But if you’re like me, you like to write, but realize this is not a publisher, it’s blog hive. If you want readers you have to be one, and you can adjust your readership up and down by being more or less social.

I recall a line from Quentin Crisp, that to have friends, we don’t have to know what to say, we have to learn how to listen.

“Now, we’d all like to have friends, but if you have to listen, the price is ridiculous.”

Now I think of Medium as built on a model of sales associates. Each pays a portion of the administrative costs, plus an administrative fee, and in return gets services which would otherwise have to be borne individually, like advertising and marketing, space for doing business, etc. All the associates have the same status because they all pay the same administrative fee.

There are of course areas where informational writing is valuable and will be widely distributed, which is why there’s a lot of readership in blogs about business startups and tech information. Sometimes an article I write gets a lot of views because of the subject. I think I got the most views writing about John Lurie.

But for somebody who is writing really good copy, but without a target audience, it might get lonely. When this happens think of the man who began to play his flute beside the road, as his prayer. He kept playing and people began to listen, but he was praying, not performing. It didn’t matter. Once in awhile they gather to hear your prayer.

If you understand this is a social network you can navigate more easily by picturing the hive structure. Each cell can begin a new hive. Explosive growth. But at one level it’s like Facebook. Some people are focused on how many friends they can get, and measure success in the numbers. Others know they can’t really enjoy more than a few friends, though they are delighted sometimes to have a party going on.

The key takeaway is that you can get what you want if you take the path that leads in that direction

If you want to make money … well I’m floundering on how to do that. Adelia?

“Haha! Yes, aren’t we all!! OK, let’s see. Click-baity titles and subtitles, hot topics du jour, and read everything and comment on everything. Engage, engage, engage, and follow everyone. .. including everyone who follows you. This is a full time job. Be a little bit outrageous, vulnerable, critical, um… sorry. Gotta go. There’s an enormous spider on the ceiling above my bed.

“LOL! Well, I chased him downstairs, and he’s hiding under the sofa, so I’m safe for now. Back to Medium. Jesus.”