Medium

“Just because you've democratized access to the medium, it doesn't mean you've democratized access to the economics.”

“We raised about thirteen million dollars across a couple of rounds, a seed and an A... Across both, yeah, total about two and a half million DAU. So a lot of users, but we just couldn't figure out how to monetize it... I think we got to about a million in erro…”

“There was something just suspect about the service provider that they use where it's like they, that at the same time, this article is coming out, that service provider is using the article to try to get me to hire them.”

“We saw like a 10 X increase in what people were trying to post on medium.”

“I think what we've heard from Google actually is sometimes they're confused by what we're saying no index to. And I've gotten emails that are, that have really brought up stories that, that literally ask why these 10 stories aren't indexed.”

“Writing is thinking and smart people like to think that's not going away when you have a thought and you put it under paper, put it, you know, type it out. Suddenly this, like all these subconscious, like feelings about that thought, all of your like life less…”

“We learned really early on that medium is a big enough corpus of data that we can poison the the results of any large language model.”

“I'm saying it's because of medium. Absolutely. It's because we've in part, we popularized it in other parts of the internet too, but the medium corpus is very, very deep in those. And so, right. So when you hear, oh, this must've been written by AI because…”

“I think that if we can't find some fair exchange of value, if we can't get something going, if they insist on continuing to train and work around our blocks and, you know, continuing to avoid even paying for what they're training on. I think we're just like …”

“80% of what gets published on medium is by people that are just using the tool and the medium network for distribution. They're not you know, the vast majority of the internet is non-professional writers.”

“The thing that we want to pay for to make sure it exists on the internet is your real life lessons. And this idea of paying you to spend 15 seconds generating a ChatGPT transcript, Just not even doesn't even make sense to us as a worthy thing to pay for”

“Medium is a Cloudflare customer and a happy one, and we do use Cloudflare to block basically any crawler that isn't crawling in a way that drives traffic back to us, we're blocking right now.”

“If we get any money out of these AI companies, we want to give all of it back to the creators. Like so far, every other platform has been doing side deals and then just pocketing the money.”

“ChatGPT is about one percent of what we see from Google right now.”

“The thing that's really important to us is that it converts into paid subscribers four times higher than Google traffic.”

“ChatGPT was on a tremendous growth curve from the fall of last year to the spring of this year, and then leveled out. And a bunch of people said, oh, it's only, it's all college students, and it'll pick back up when school starts again. We haven't seen that. S…”

“I would estimate that we lose about a hundred clicks from traditional Google search for every one click we get back from a Gemini summary.”

“The click-through rate when Gemini launched dropped nearly in half.”

“That idea of I could learn how to do my job because someone else who had, who's better at my job is just happens to be writing about it on the internet. Like that's the most commercially viable content on the internet. Like, I hate to break it to you, to anyon…”

“We got out of it. We were profitable. And then this, like, we're trying to say, like, we're not competing with the creator economy. And for a while, one of the things that people don't see is how many people are writing on medium. It had been flat during our s…”

“I want professional media to exist and thrive. And Medium has a different business. We're not the ones that are going to make that happen.”

“I just wanted to do a test, frankly to see, I have a lot of followers there. And so I was just testing what, if any distribution is still left, turns out there's none.”

“What we had learned from social networks was that The value was in the connectivity. Like, if Twitter just did what Blogger did and posted your tweet to a webpage and didn't fan it out, if there wasn't this follow mechanism, it wouldn't be very interesting. I…”

“He's doing a great job, doing a better job than I was doing running Medium.”

“If I say unfair or secret, I usually mean, like, not something that you probably read on, like, a medium, but like, what did you learn? How did you learn it? And how does it work? And how do you apply it? You also just get amazing, interesting, like, bits of i…”

“Substack has basically massively disrupted Medium. Substack has done what Medium was supposed to do. It's a publishing platform. It's not actually a newsletter platform. It's a blog post by email platform.”

“Every month medium pays me like 1500 dollars, and then YouTube pays me a little bit more every month because the channel is growing”

“So it's basically external discovery first, and then later do the internal once the platform is bigger.”

“Why are you giving medium all of your content? They're gaining all of the upside, all of the SEO, all the subscribers. You don't get any email addresses of your audience. So you have no access if you leave. And so that was the benefit of sub stack. And it was …”

“The amount of people that have been muzzled, stifled, the amount of fact and science that literally just gets judged willy-nilly by our distribution points like Facebook and Twitter and Medium. It's really scary. So censorship made a roaring comeback in 2020.”

“I think if you look at what happened with Substack, to just take a second to look at that business, and it's a wonderful product, a wonderful founding team, and they're much more competitive with, say, Medium. And we don't necessarily look at them as competito…”

“We basically help developers of website apps like Medium, Twitch, Under Armour, and many users, and power their internal search. So if you search on any of these companies you basically, you are basically using us behind the scene.”

“Using Medium as a vehicle to talk about what they're doing As a company, wasn't just useful for them to get it out there to the public, but was also a really useful vehicle for them to reinforce all this stuff internally. It's like, it's funny, it's all the sa…”

“One of the things that's super interesting about VR is it's kind of the first, ah, medium of media where the formats aren't defined and locked in from the very beginning. There's lots and lots of, ah, experimentation because it's kind of the first, ah, the fir…”

“For the non-viral posts, medium is actually the biggest source for the traffic, which was, you know, early indicators that they are able to match.”

“A lot of the best networks that are platformed here aren't spending anything on, on acquisition. I mean, it's just, it's kind of an interesting thing in marketplace. Facebook, no. WhatsApp, no. Medium, no. You know, just OpenTable, no. Just, you know, just, th…”

“If you want to get read, you've got to be in some kind of a platform that's giving your audience, and increasingly that means Facebook, or it means Medium, or it means LinkedIn, or it means some other intermediate platform that kind of comes with an implicit a…”

“And so I think probably our first 300 customers were coming from content that I was writing on Like medium or, and then sharing on hacker news or guest posts or on our blog and writing about email, which I think was a topic that people like treating about or l…”

“People connect with other humans, and so you, like having that little extra touch is nice, but I would say overall like you're gonna want it on your own site for SEO. Yeah, I like, I kind of disagree with people putting stuff on Medium and stuff early on.”

“I mean, I don't know exactly what Fred's been talking about consumer downturn, but I don't, I think there's plenty of space. So, I think most people didn't think there was space for Snapchat a couple years ago. Now, now people do. You used to look at Musical.l…”

“Our bet is that, you know, as this medium matures, that it's going to be heading in the direction of sort of premium television, that like, there's going to be, you know, higher and higher production values, more and more sort of like creative energy into crea…”

“Their portfolio includes the likes of Medium, Dollar Shave Club, And Dog Vacay, just to name a few, and their leadership is responsible for an astonishing 12 acquisitions and over a billion dollars in exits.”