Tony,

I was kind of amazed to see that you took the time to read and clap for a comment I left on one of your recent posts. I was at #72 in the list, so I was pretty sure it was the kind of thing that would never get seen.

I was planning on offering feedback on this specific post a week or so ago(congratulations, btw, on becoming CEO) but gave up because my post was running very long and I figured it would never be seen. But it seems like you're paying attention, so I thought I'd offer my take.

This is going to be very presumptuous. The truth is I don't know much about your industry and can only call it like I see it from the outside. At best I hope this gives you an angle to think about things from. And if I'm off base because of my lack of information I get that; I'm okay with being wrong.

Here's what I see from outside, though: a lot of people in Silicon Valley don't seem to accept the viral nature of their business.

I've been watching viral trends for a while now and most of them (exemplified in the "one hit" viral phenomena) follow a pattern that looks to me like a quick burst of exponential growth followed by an attenuation and then a long, slow exponential decay.

This pattern shows up in a lot of places. I've seen it in the Nielsen ratings for Wrestling in the 90's, in academic journal articles tracking the performance of New York Times best-sellers, the stock market performance of alt-coins, and in Google trends graphs showing the number of searches for comedians' latest specials. I'm sure the basic pattern must be well known to anyone in Silicon Valley at this point - it's the shape of fame.

In terms of businesses in Silicon Valley it seems like they're subject to this viral effect. When a business is new it experiences a rapid spike in attention - that would be the result of enthusiasm for the new business/trend rapidly propagating through the full audience of people who are potentially interested in it.

It seems like most have a turnaround point, though. I get the impression that this is what happened with Facebook; learning about the Facebook Papers it seems a lot of their questionable decisions were enacted against a backdrop of user engagement that was declining in a slow, linear fashion (my money says it's actually curvilinear; exponential decay, and all that, with appropriate allowances for the effects of everything FB was doing to desperately mitigate the loss of engagement).

In terms of what this implies, it's pretty simple; at the beginning of a company's life their engagement is the result of a combination of the enthusiasm their product generates, and the utility of their product. Over time, the enthusasm fades and the utility is probably what is left.

In the case of Medium, I'm not sure what your company is going through. A lot of authors are spectulating that Medium is facing tough times. I get the impression that Medium is aging as a platform and there's a lot of head-scratching going on about how to revitalize it.

For my money, one of the biggest problems is that you guys have limited the growth of your authors by shackling it to the fame of your platform. Most authors can’t grow past the market that you’ve created — and that’s tragic because it means they can’t bring in interest (and money) from outside the market that you’ve created.

It seems like you guys are trying to replicate what Apple did with their store, creating a closed “writer’s market” of your own. But Apple has (had?) the benefit of being the top competitor in a market where they had a huge amount of growth potential and only a few competitors, where their innovation could continually expand the size of the market. Medium has to compete against all of the text on the internet.

The MPP is a great idea. But it's limited because the total payout for a Medium author will only ever be limited to what they can get from the pool, and they are in direct competition with other writers. And worse, it seems like many or most of the people paying into the pool are writers. I observed wryly once that this was sort of a Squid Games setup. I'll stand by that observation; the MPP is awesome. But it limits authors and also makes them jealous of each other even at the same time as they're forced to play to each other in an attempt to get their share of the cash pool.

And, importantly, few of your authors are able to write in a way that grows Medium’s reader base because their entire incentive scheme is effectively shackled to Medium’s existing reader base. I don’t think it is a coincidence that many of your wildly successful authors are also those who have an actively growing, thriving web presence outside of Medium, and who view Medium as just one small market for their larger endeavors.

Phrased in terms of funding, it seems like you guys have basically said to authors “Don’t worry about that money thing. We’ll make money and give you money through our own mysterious mechanisms.” Most authors I’ve read don’t seem to know what those mechanisms are. We just assume it’s venture capital funding and a small amount brought in by subscribers.

Seems like a natural next step to supercharging Medium would be for you to take a good look at all the people writing energetically for your platform and say “…hey guys. Maybe you could also help us make money? Like… we’ll help you figure out how to bring in lots of money for yourselves on the internet. And you can help fund us with a little bit of that.”

A lot of people have talked about Medium finding ways to monetize outside traffic. I think that is perhaps one of the best moves Medium could make at this point, strategically.

The reason for that is that it would incentivize many of the brilliant writers within your platform to start actively drawing in traffic from outside of it, using your platform as a base. By benefiting them, you would essentially break out of the pattern of shackling writers' potential to Medium's own level of fame, and you would instead position Medium to benefit from your writers' own potential to go viral in the internet at large.

I'm sure there are reasons that this hasn't been done. It seems like the big challenge would be making such a shift while still keeping Medium faithful to the vision that Ev had for it in the first place. And, to be honest, I don't have answers for how to wed those two things.

But I think if you were to find a way to do that it would be an immense benefit to the platform. And also, it seems like it would be congruent with what I have seen of your way of doing things, based on reading your work. You help develop talent so that it can succeed, and you also lay a foundation for talents that you can't develop--talents that would otherwise be overlooked--to build success for themselves. I suspect that might be a large part of why you were hired as CEO. It seems like Medium was always a passion product of Ev's, and that what he wanted more than anything was to create a company that was astounding at finding and developing talent, and giving it a forum to grow in. You're probably the ideal guy for making that happen.

Anyhow, thank you for your consideration - and, again, given how little I know about the details I would not be surprised if I'm wrong on many points, here. But I hope you find something useful in this.

Meanwhile, Medium has my support no matter what happens; I credit your company for turning me from a dreamer into a writer, and I have already used it as a base from which to develop myself in the direction I want to go as a professional. I hope you'll be able to do the same, and more, for many other people in the future.

J