Tony Stubblebine
CEO, Medium. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounderengineerauthor@tonystubblebine ↗LinkedIn ↗medium.com ↗
Tony Stubblebine is the CEO of Medium, overseeing the platform's content strategy and creator policies. He previously co-founded Coach.me, served as VP of engineering at Odeo, and authored the Regular Expression Pocket Reference.
Everything Tony Stubblebine said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Medium Threatens to Poison AI Training Data If Companies Refuse to Pay
“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 …”
Pangram Labs Pitched Medium Using Ongoing Wired Investigation Data
“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.”
AI Models Will Lack Reliable Information Beyond 2025 Without Creator Compensation
“The information they're pulling in, it is literally going to stop showing up on the internet. And it's like chat TPT will give you good advice for a 20, 25 and earlier, but nothing beyond that.”
Medium Loses 100 Google Clicks for Every One Click From Google Gemini
“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.”
Medium's Google Search Click-Through Rate Dropped by Half After Gemini's Launch
“The click-through rate when Gemini launched dropped nearly in half.”
Medium's Content Corpus Is Large Enough to Poison Any AI Model
“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.”
ChatGPT Uses Em Dashes So Frequently Because It Trained on Medium
“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…”
Medium Will Only Pay Writers for Lived Human Experiences, Not AI Text
“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 Plans to Pass 100% of AI Licensing Revenue to Creators
“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.”
Stubblebine: Twitter's early turnover was team upgrading, not co-founder feuds
“It wasn't that the co-founders were feuding at the, or that there was any sort of scandal. It was just, they're constantly trying to upgrade the team in order to keep up with what Twitter ended up being, which, you know, obviously had nothing to do with where …”
Medium Saw a 10x Surge in Submissions Following the AI Boom
“We saw like a 10 X increase in what people were trying to post on medium.”
Generative AI Will Not Replace Human Writing Because Writing Is Thinking
“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…”
A Large Portion of the Twitter Exodus Actually Went to Discord
“We think Twitter, there was a Twitter exodus and it went to like most people think the Twitter exodus went to blue sky and to threads and originally a little bit to mastodon. I would make the case that a lot of it went to discord.”
ChatGPT Traffic Converts to Paid Subscriptions 4x Higher Than Google Search
“The thing that's really important to us is that it converts into paid subscribers four times higher than Google traffic.”
Practitioners Sharing Job Expertise Is the Most Commercially Viable Internet Content
“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…”
Medium Is Profitable With Active Writer Numbers Up 50% Since January
“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…”
Medium's Business Model Is Not Built to Support Professional Media
“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.”
Stubblebine: Jack Dorsey was the only reliable employee at Odeo
“The you know, the whole team was really chaotic, and I mostly spent time dealing with other people's problems, and Jack was the only reliable person.”
Google Personally Emailed Medium Asking Why Specific Stories Were Not Indexed
“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.”
AI Automates Bureaucratic Writing, But Cannot Replicate Genuine Thinking
“Where people are getting confused is it just turns out there's a lot of writing that's only done for bullshit reasons, right? It's like I'm required to give a report or I have to pass some writing up to some bureaucracy, right? And so you're just checking the …”
Medium Blocks Any Web Crawler That Does Not Drive Referral Traffic
“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.”
ChatGPT Drives Only 1% of the Referral Traffic Medium Gets From Google
“ChatGPT is about one percent of what we see from Google right now.”
ChatGPT Referral Traffic to Medium Has Plateaued Since Spring
“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…”
The other half of the tape: Tony Stubblebine's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ray Edwards 3Alex Kantrowitz 3
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 3
Big Technology 3
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2016 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tony's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | CEO, Medium | 1 | 22 | — | full record on Big Technology → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | CEO, Medium | 1 | 11 | — | full record on Top Founders → |