Medium

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 …”

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

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

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

“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.”

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