Backstage Reports That Medium Will End

This story was originally published on medium.com

A single story has left some Medium creators with fleas in their ears.

In the last week of 2021, I joined a debate of a community for Medium creators and enthusiasts. In that debate, there was a lot of talk about the latest situations of Medium, from its updates and the declines that creators have been facing over the months, which has not just declined for a portion of creators but has declined for almost 98% of the 58 million Medium creators. ( that’s right, there are over 58 million creators on Medium, you can see it in the number of followers on the Medium Staff page). There was also a lot of talk about what the recurring referral program might be, some people went very deep on the subject, and it was exactly through this sub-theme that the end of Medium was speculated.

Today talking to a friend from the UK, we were talking about Vocal and how it was changing, then she touches on the same subject that was debated a week ago; she said the following, “I’m asking about Vocal because it’s good to be on two platforms, it’s going to end Medium.“ With that thought of hers I was skeptical because it seemed like a familiar complaint, something that was said in a short time and seeing someone who was not in the debate talking about one of the most stayed points in the debate.

Is Medium going to End? Is there something going on behind all this? Do the creators need to prepare for the worst?

The Initial Cause of this Thought

One of the things that were talked about the most, and gave rise to so many other things, was one of the latest stories that Medium shared on December 15. A sort of Rewind about the various Medium stories that moved emotions within the platform throughout 2021. At the beginning of that story, the author says:” In 2021, more than 534,000 writers published 2.3 million stories on Medium – about everything from personal growth to programming to data science and beyond. They shared honest, personal viewpoints. Started conversations and asked important questions. Made sense of the unexpected. “

So far so good for those who couldn’t care less about analytics. The question that left fleas in the developers’ ears was, only half a million writers were active in 2021 on Medium? There are over 125 million monthly active readers, but only 534K published relevant stories? Where is Medium filled with thousands of creators? Medium gains new creators every day, why only that number consistently published in 2021?

That number has left several creators worried about the future of the platform. Many even speculate the end of a great empire that was being created, if not why Medium developed the recurring referral system so that creators could fend for themselves and be funded by referrals and no longer by the effectiveness of stories selected in threads.

Ideas like the flawed curation system were debated, the algorithm having trouble targeting the real content internally, because even email, IM, and direct no longer works as it used to, (internal views are not having the effect they had before and monetization has dropped).

Medium’s monetization has dropped and recurring referrals now dominate monetization on the platform. Of course, there are a good portion of creators making big digits, their work hasn’t had any change, on the contrary, they keep growing more and more, but most of them are at a loss for what to do in the coming months because if Medium doesn’t improve, the referrals won’t stick around forever, they’ll stop paying the subscription fee and the authors will lose their guaranteed monthly monetization.

But then Medium will end?

No, Medium is not going to end in my opinion. I will say the same thing I said to my friend from the UK and what I discussed there at the meeting. “Medium is in a not very good moment for the creators, but for the management of Medium, everything is fine; from January until the end of 2021 Medium was announcing the purchase of new startups. What I inferred in all this is:

1. Medium is organizing an arsenal to come with everything in the market and beat all competitors, and to not hinder the creators, since it would involve a lot of capital to acquire the companies, they had to leave a plan B where the creators could subsist while they were doing the transition process, hence the creation of the recurring referral program.

2. Medium is restructuring, implementing major changes that could affect not only monetization but also curation and algorithm performance. So, to not leave creators helpless like a pyramid that decides to shit on the face of the majority and go around happy with their earnings, they created a place where creators could survive. (Recurring Referrals).

3. Medium maybe implements some changes in payment methods, and may even be creating a system that accepts cryptocurrencies. (You never know, things tend to go Web 3.0).

4. Medium is working on new features that will give control to the creators and make Medium better and more profitable for the creators where they can get income to support their families.

5. My last possibility was that Medium, may be going through a very bad period yes, but that they will turn it around. Because I have something in mind; whoever runs Medium was nicknamed the Lebron James of Blogging, and he built Medium to be his home where he felt good, so I don’t think he would end up with Medium by selling it maybe like the owner of MySpace did.

And what do you think about all this? I am still convinced of great things to come. This is all just the tip of the iceberg.