Disclosure
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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Disclosure
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”
Disclosure
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Opinion
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Disclosure
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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 …”
Disclosure
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Eighty Percent of Articles on Medium Are Written by Non-Professionals
“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.”
