Pod Insights Equity Podcast Why Medium is opting out of AI About this episode This week we had Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, the CEO of Medium.com, a publishing platform that he has helmed for more than a year.
Medium has gone through a number of versions over the years. Pivots, if you will. But what has been a steady focus in Medium's life in recent years has been its subscription business. Medium offers a paid membership tier that costs $5 per month or $50 per year. And, Tony was willing to share, it's growing once again and is heading toward a pretty key milestone.
We also got into:
The business of the written word.
Medium's stance on AI and what its posture says about how the company views the value of writing. (More on the matter from TechCrunch here.)
Why Medium thinks that everyone has something worth saying.
There's a little bit of media insider chat during this podcast, which we hope you enjoy. As always, we're back with our weekly roundup on Friday. Talk then!
For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.
Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more!
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Transcript 0:11 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and this is our Wednesday show, where we sit down with a guest, think about their work and unpack the rest. Today, we are talking with Tony Stubblebine, the CEO of web publishing platform Medium.com. You may have heard of it, I guarantee you've at least been there. And on the show today, the economics of online publishing, how to build a media startup that lasts, and also the value exchange between AI companies and online content. Now, before Tony was the CEO of Medium, he worked for O'Reilly way back in the day in their digital publishing efforts. He also built a number of publications on the Medium.com platform that drove a not insubstantial amount of overall traffic to that service.
0:56 Speaker 00 Tony, welcome to the show.
0:57 Speaker 01 Hey, thanks for having me.
0:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, that was way more flowery and polite than I usually do on my intros, just so you know.
1:03 Speaker 01 That's good, that was perfect. Yeah, I mean, I've been around, I've seen some stuff, pre Web 2.0, you know, so that comes into play occasionally here at Medium.
1:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, being around, having seen some stuff, actually is pretty much where I wanted to start. Because I have known about Medium, I have, I think, written a couple of posts on Medium, I have known it through its various incarnations, I have had friends that have worked there, I have friends that work there now. I'm kind of curious, 14 months into your tenure as CEO, what is Medium today?
1:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a publishing platform that's supported by a subscription for the best of Medium. And so the subscription goes to pay for the authors, to help incentivize them to write their very best stuff, and it goes to curators and editors to help find and surface the best things on the internet. And I think, when we think about our purpose, we think... We want to be an alternative to the attention economy. You know, like, people want to pay for substance, stuff that actually changes their lives and makes their lives better. And that's rare these days.
2:10 Speaker 00 So Medium, so you're framing it much more than a place where everyone can write. It's a place where there is an economic engine designed to encourage, incentivize, and I would say, reward, writing of a particular type. Is that fair?
2:25 Speaker 01 It's so hard to say a particular type. It's more, I would say, a particular quality or a particular take on quality. So, I mean, obviously, we are all living on this internet where it feels very divisive. It feels very loud. The most divisive opinion wins. And I had come from this completely opposite take on publishing where we were, this is the O'Reilly experience, which is now 20 years ago.
2:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:49 Speaker 01 Where it's, what is the best possible advice that we can give on the topic that we happen to be covering? So O'Reilly was always mostly covering programming topics.
2:58 Speaker 00 Sure.
2:59 Speaker 01 But the way you get that is through a lot of hard work and a lot of subject matter expertise. And there's probably no, no word more divisive to our authors than expertise. And I think they forget that by definition, everyone is an expert in their own life. Like, everyone has something useful to give to the world, but the rest of the internet kind of incentivizes the opposite. Let me just sound off with my opinion. And what's the point of actually researching it or basing it off of, you know, things I know at a deep level?
3:29 Speaker 00 Tony, you don't have to take my Twitter account to task quite that hard this early in our chat.
3:34 Speaker 01 That's the worst.
3:35 Speaker 00 Geez, brutal. No, by, by type, I was more thinking substantive and long-form versus of a particular, you know, genre or even, or even topic area. But you touched on something very interesting there. Just prepping for our chat today, I was going back through your state of Medium talk that you gave earlier this year. And you did kind of reprise that idea that everyone is an expert in their own life. And to me, that puts a very human-centric framing around what Medium is. And I was curious if that's fair, because earlier in the history of Medium, there were a couple of in-house publications that ranged across topics and there was a pretty wide Variety of stuff that was often journalistic, but still varied. But that framing feels more people talking about stuff that they are either very invested in or have lived through.
4:20 Speaker 00 And that feels narrower to a degree, if that makes sense.
4:23 Speaker 01 It's funny that it comes across to you as narrower because I look at the voices that are on the internet and I see journalists, which are great and serve a really important role. I see the creator economy, which is mixed, but the top of it also serves a really important role. But in my opinion, the world of, we call doers as sort of an opposite to creators. The world of doers who write is 100 times bigger than the entire creator economy. They might not write daily for years on end, of course, because they don't have anything to write about till they've gone out and lived. So like, we're positive that that world of authors is much bigger and has something that's kind of lost in the internet right now.
5:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, I think the way that I was thinking about this is a little bit off. So I was thinking about experts on their lived experiences as being about living. It sounds more now like you're saying people are experts through their life in certain areas and topics. And that's what they're going to bring to the platform.
5:17 Speaker 01 Right, and this is why it's so broad, right? Like Medium, you could be talking about gardening or you could be talking about equity. I mean, just to give it like a more concrete example. I was talking to one of our investors the other day. You know, we're 11 years old, we've got like financial cruft. And I was like, this is Mark Suster, who's many people know. And I was like, Mark, you know, is there any way we can clean this up? Do you have any advice? And he starts telling me, like, kind of going on a rant, has really strong opinions about what we should do. And then he stops mid rant and he goes, Tony, just read my Medium post about it. And so I go and I read it, I was like, oh, this is exactly what I needed, right? And so how many people need to read this post? Twenty, you know?
6:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:01 Speaker 01 It's so specific to being a CEO of a venture-funded startup. But for me, it was the most powerful information I could have imagined that day. And it's coming from someone with lived experience, right?
6:13 Speaker 00 Yeah. So this actually brings up the subscription model of Medium. Because I've been a Medium subscriber. I forgot to double check if I still am. I did have my credit card get hacked a little while ago, so I had to replace it. So I may have accidentally lapsed. But when I think about paying for Medium, I'm going to subscribe. And then for a set dollar amount per month or per year, I have access to a whole lot of stuff. And to me, it's cool that you can have stuff on Medium that is so tailored that it's the exact thing that 20 people need. But even with a subscription model, I can't see a way in which that piece of content is going to generate lots of economic value. And so to me, there's still something about distribution leading to earned value on Medium, if you will. And I'm just trying to figure out how you're balancing the tension between having stuff that is applicable to a narrow audience at times, so it goes deep,
6:58 Speaker 00 but also having the economics work out so that way folks are incentivized to keep producing.
7:02 Speaker 01 This is so nerdy. Because if we can go nerdy on the economics of writing.
7:07 Speaker 00 Please.
7:07 Speaker 01 Is when I first started writing as a partner on Medium, so this was before I was the CEO, we got into this little bit of a headbutting with certain authors. Because I was going after subject matter experts. And I was asking for 3,000-word essays, and I was paying $500. This was a different era where we had commissioning was possible. And they loved it. Because for them, they're like, it's already in their head. It's a chance to organize it, put it out. It's not actually that much work to write 3,000 words if you already know everything.
7:38 Speaker 00 Yep.
7:38 Speaker 01 But then every now and then, we'd get an actual journalist who'd come through and say, I want to write on this topic. And we say, yeah, we're looking for 3,000 to 5,000 words. And they're like, what? And you're paying 10 cents a word? So if anyone who's been around professional writers, that's sort of like the gold standards. They want to get paid a dollar a word. And they're like, are you trying to cheat me? I'm like, no, you're just not our target author. So the Mark Suster, he wants distribution to an audience of 20, the right 20, who he's going to invest in one of them. That company's going to go public, he's going to make. You know, $10 million for the fund or something, right? $100 million for the fund. But his economics are not about necessarily the size of the distribution or the amount that we pay him. There's other people who feel differently.
8:21 Speaker 01 It's like, I think people with a great story that's broadly applicable, they're having this other challenge that Medium serves, which is you shouldn't have to be a marketer in order to get heard. You know, like on the current platforms, it's so required that you understand SEO, that you understand virality. And it's like, well, what if you just have a great story? Is there a place that's looking for that? I mean, we're not going to be perfect, but we're looking for that and we're looking to boost that as widely as possible. The differentiator for Medium is we're trying to distribute people who don't already have an audience.
8:53 Speaker 00 Right. And so then I think I better understand now the product that you want to have out in the market. I understand the subscription element to this because I run a subscription media business myself. So I'm, I'm not going to let us nerd out about that because no one else cares but you and I. It's talking about a 20-person audience for that.
9:09 Speaker 01 Later.
9:10 Speaker 00 But I'm familiar with that. But I'm very curious about the supply side of this because Medium has been a place that has, it has become in many ways the de facto place for folks to go write something they need to put out to address a thing that's happened in their business or career or whatever. But when I'm thinking about the people that you're describing, it doesn't sound like you want, you're expecting to have a lot of, you know, like professional journalists come on board and like replace their day job. Because it's subscription, you're clearly shooting for quality. So people need to have sufficient writing chops to do well. So who is like the perfect person in the middle of your target market on the supply side of actually doing the writing itself?
9:44 Speaker 01 Probably a lot of your listeners, right? You're talking to a professional audience that has something to say because they have a profession. Their profession is not building a mailing list for their writing, right? So, I mean, you know, aside, right?
9:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:58 Speaker 01 That's a great example for us that somehow writing for you, your audience is portfolio building. Or it's just like the standard impulse on the internet is, I know something and I want to share it, right? Like, there used to be this real positivity to the internet that was like kind of the headline, which is... I want to be helpful, right? So that's the right in the crosshairs of someone that we would be looking for. We need, obviously, we need a lot of them because how often do you have something like that that's worth sharing? Maybe you write like four to 10 times a year?
10:31 Speaker 00 Sure.
10:31 Speaker 01 And that's fine for us, right?
10:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, okay. Now, there's an economic component to this because Medium, even though I'm not going to go through the company's history because, one, we've covered it ad nauseam on Tech Winter over the years, and two, I'm more interested in the current era than the past. But through some different strategies over the years, the company has grown a very large subscriber base. And I don't think everyone knows how big it is, but I do know that back in March of 21, you guys said you had around 725,000 paid subscribers. And then in your State of the Union, you mentioned that you had seen some churn, but it kind of brought the ship back and we're seeing, honestly, pretty rapid growth at the time. So I'm curious, how big is the subscriber base of Medium that provides this economic engine today?
11:15 Speaker 01 Are you fishing for transparency and numbers from me, a CEO?
11:20 Speaker 00 That was about, that was about as polite as I can say. Tell me the damn number, Tony. Come on, stamping my foot.
11:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think the numbers help tell the story. We announced 720,000 subscribers back when you said it went up a little bit further. Our, our high point was 760,000 subscribers. But when I took over, we'd been lost. We had been getting really good at driving attention, actually. Our recommendation algorithm had gotten better and better, but the more that we got things in front of people that they would click and read, the more that they unsubscribed, which is counterintuitive to all of us, but which now we explain as what people are willing to read is very different than what people are happy to have read.
12:02 Speaker 00 Ah.
12:03 Speaker 01 That's just very different. And this is actually, in a way, we're grateful because this is why we wanted to be a subscription business in the first place, is we wanted our incentives to be aligned with the readers. So it took all year, basically, to redo our incentives, redo our recommendation algorithm, because it can't just be around attention there. Like, we put subject matter experts as a signal inside of the recommendations. And as a result, the quality of the substance went way up, even though sometimes we'd make a change and the click-through rate would go down. And still, we knew as someone who would know, like, You know, I know reading Mark Suster about venture capital is different than reading someone who's just sounding off about venture capital, but has never raised money, let alone, you know, is a VC, right?
12:47 Speaker 01 Well, you're close enough to it, but there's plenty of people that are willing to write that have no, just no experience, right? And so when we did that, everything changed. The churn rate got better, the growth got better. And so I think it was August 23rd. So when I took over, I don't want to gloss over the numbers. I almost did, and it would have been completely accidental.
13:08 Speaker 00 I was gonna, I was gonna bring you back and be like, the CEO who promised transparency has pulled off the greatest CEO trick in the book. Confuse them with personal anecdotes. Keep going.
13:16 Speaker 01 When I took over, we were at 682,000 subscribers. So we had dropped quite a bit. And in fact, that drop had been accelerating as we were getting closer to me taking over. So actually, maybe it wasn't the most compelling looking job in the world, but I was close enough to medium. I just felt the case I made to the board and the investors was we can right the ship and there's a reason for medium to exist. And so August 23rd, we're back at our high point and we've had back to back, like all time record growth months for us. I don't want to say what we have today, just because we're coming up on a bigger milestone and I just save it for then.
13:52 Speaker 00 I mean, there's only two milestones that could be coming up. One would be 750,000 and one would be a million. I'll be curious to know which one it is and I presume you'll call me when it's time to share that.
14:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're coming up on a million and we want to announce that when it happens.
14:05 Speaker 00 Okay, excellent. No, I'm, I'm excited about that because to me, it sounds like medium has found its source and it knows who it wants to get stuff from. It has an idea of who wants to distribute it to and how. And at a million subscribers, when you get to that point at $5 a month, it's 60 million a year in top line. Of course you have COGS, you share that with writers to some degree, but it looks like medium is going to be big enough that you can't kill it. That's my perspective on that number. It feels like self sustaining and like robust at that point.
14:34 Speaker 01 No, that's, we'll be profitable by May or earlier, and that doesn't rely on any new work on our part, just the current traction puts us at that. So, I mean, that's huge. I think one of the things with the publishing platform and the thing that I've tried to get across to our writers is you can rely on us. And medium has this history of pivoting, which is like somewhat deserved. But what better message can we put out to people that you can rely on us than, you know, we're profitable, we're a sustainable business now?
15:02 Speaker 00 I mean, a profitable private company is akin to a, a public company, profitable or not, because then you can expect that it's going to kind of keep going. I want to talk about AI because your perspective on that's very interesting, but I'm going to squeeze in one more question here before we do that. Medium's been around for a long time. There are some newer entrants to the do writing on the internet and make some money from it category that I've had a lot of attention in the last couple of years. Your Substacks, your Beehives, R I P, review, never had a chance to touch Twitter, I guess.
15:30 Speaker 01 I was a review user.
15:31 Speaker 00 Me too. I thought it was cool to have it inside of Twitter and then it just, I don't know. So do you think these are competing products? Or do you think you have different enough inputs and audiences that really you're not kind of at each other's necks, if that makes sense?
15:46 Speaker 01 The world of online publishing is massive. Like I would put ConvertKit in there, I'd put Squarespace in there.
15:52 Speaker 00 Sure.
15:52 Speaker 01 It's just a massive, massive space. And the key thing for us is to be differentiated and good. And we're differentiated on business model, we're differentiated on focus, we're differentiated on how we handle recommendations. And it just, if the business continues to do well, we have now a lot of runway to keep doing that, to keep really pushing the envelope on how good can we be? And I think we're a lot better than when I took over a year ago, but I think also we have a lot of opportunity to be even better, yeah.
16:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, the thing that really strikes me about the Medium model in contrast to other things is you guys are effectively selling a bundle to a degree.
16:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:28 Speaker 00 One subscription, lots of content. Everything else is more tailored around a individual publication as a standalone or individual writer. And so I think it's going to be cool to see, not taking aside here, how the different approaches to this do over time. But if you're trucking that close towards that major subscriber milestone, clearly there's quite a lot that's working. All right, we're going to take a quick break, everybody. And when we get back, we're going to talk about AI and how to keep your secret sauce safe.
16:58 Speaker 00 We are back with Tony and we are going to talk about AI because Medium stuck its oar into the lake of AI conversation by taking a stance. And I'm going to take a shot at summarizing this, Tony, but essentially you guys are going to block crawling. And the way that I can kind of think about it is draw a moat around the words on your side and keep them to yourself. Is that a fair summary?
17:17 Speaker 01 It's sort of the opposite of what we're normally do. I mean, our job is not to keep the words to ourselves. Our job is like, you put the words on Medium and we get them out there. Just a really weird situation with AI where there's no exchange of value. And I just like, I've so rarely seen this on the internet, right? Like, they're building a business on, not my words, but on the words of the authors on Medium, and nothing comes back. And I suspected that if this was explained bluntly to our authors, that they would not be happy. And I was right. As we talked back channel with authors and then more recently publicly, it just became an issue of basic fairness. First of all, there's no consent, there's no credit, there's no compensation, nothing is coming back to
18:00 Speaker 01 the authors. And so the question then is, why would we bother participating in this ecosystem? We don't get anything back. And then it's actually much worse, because the number one thing that I hear from our authors, our editors, our curators, our readers, is that they're seeing like, just spam essentially, that's obviously AI generated. And so, like, we can see AI generate cool stuff sometimes, but on balance, we're facing this flood of spam. Medium is pretty good at hiding that from the readers, but it's harder for us to hide that from the publication editors in particular, because people are now submitting junk to them.
18:37 Speaker 00 We've actually seen this as well in certain, like, small science fiction writing competitions that have had to halt entire categories of competitions because they can't deal with the massive influx of AI spam, which is just tragedy of the commons to some degree, is how I feel about it. Like, it just makes me kind of sad. So I'm curious, though, about detecting AI. We'd hear a lot about this in educational context, and can teachers tell when students are using AI? You guys say that you can just tell. Just kind of like a human can discern. So I'm curious about how confident you are in highlighting, segregating, kind of pushing away AI-generated chaff from the rest of the stuff on Medium.
19:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, so our trust and safety team tests AI detection tools every couple of weeks, like what's new, what's been updated, and none of them are effective enough to be used in production. But because a lot of what gets recommended on Medium gets read by a human first, we get kind of the human take, which is, you know, the question of detecting AI is like, well, we don't have to be 100% confident in AI because AI-like is enough to know, well, we don't want this, right?
19:38 Speaker 00 Right.
19:38 Speaker 01 And so they just spot it instantly. It's bland, it's overconfident, it's got like a type of factual error that a human wouldn't make because, you know, a lot of the humans reading it are also kind of experts in that topic area. And so it's off. It's off in all of these obvious ways. And I think within a couple of sentences, usually, people know what's going on. You know, like the other thing too is AI embellishes with like extra stuff that you don't need to know.
20:04 Speaker 00 It's not terse.
20:06 Speaker 01 Right.
20:06 Speaker 00 It's anti-laconic. It's long-winded. It's literally a windbag attached to a computer.
20:10 Speaker 01 Yes.
20:11 Speaker 00 And I say that as someone who has a lot of fun with ChatGPT, and I'm a big fan of these AI things, on the value exchange thing, clearly with the number of LLMs that are out there in the modern kind of generative AI world, the cat has left the bag to some degree. But do you think that major model companies, your OpenAI's, et cetera, have a moral imperative to flip the value exchange here a little bit and start to remunerate people whose words they used? Because I'm kind of like cynical about this. And so I'm not like shocked that, I guarantee you, some of my words are in some of these models somewhere because I've written more than I want to admit on the internet. But I'm kind of just used to getting screwed online and people taking my data, my privacy and my stuff. So I'm almost like not shocked and not mad, but I'm curious if I'm too inured to things not being fair.
20:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, why do we accept how far the internet has fallen? Like I just, the thing I tell our team and our authors is, hey, we don't have to just accept this. So yeah, I think there is a moral imperative. I think this is the perfect podcast to discuss, is there a practical imperative? Because I I think it's really obvious that these AI companies are, you know, running the blitzscaling playbook, right?
21:16 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely.
21:17 Speaker 01 So maybe it's just not going to matter to them. But we had an offer on the table for, it was like $1 million a year for access to Medium's content. And we were going to pass this money over to our authors. And I ran it by our authors and they're like, no, like, strong no. I thought it might be a maybe, or let's negotiate for something better. It was a strong no. And I think that that says that where real people are on AI is very different than the media hype cycle on AI. That if AI wants to build real trust with real people, the AI companies, they're going to have to work a lot harder.
21:58 Speaker 00 I don't think they do, Tony.
22:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:00 Speaker 00 Because I don't think they're selling to us, other than they're selling to B2B enterprise software companies, essentially.
22:07 Speaker 01 Right. So that's the practical answer. Why bother?
22:09 Speaker 00 Well, why bother to participate? I hear you, but on the other hand, like, why do we accept things the way that they are? That really chafes because you're right. And when we're thinking about just, I mean, picking on OpenAI because they're the best known. There are other companies that have their hands in the cookie jar. I'm not trying to single them out, but they're partially owned by Microsoft, which is worth, last time I checked, several trillion dollars. And OpenAI is, you know, leaking to the media about how they're, you know, getting close to like, um, I have to go say it. A billion dollar runway, a hundred billion dollar runway?
22:37 Speaker 01 A hundred billion, yeah. Oh, yeah, the runway, right. But the valuation, they're selling on the secondary market for a hundred billion dollars now?
22:43 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:43 Speaker 01 Great.
22:44 Speaker 00 So clearly, Tony, there's no money at either of those companies to fairly pay for what they took to teach them. I don't expect a check because practically, how can they say, oh, Alex, we took 84,000 of your words that you published over the years? And here's a check for $8, whatever. But it just, the sheer, trying to find a non-profane word, you're chutzpah, there you go.
23:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, chutzpah.
23:04 Speaker 00 Of this, it just kind of boggles my mind. Like, did they expect that no one would ask where the words came from that they used to form these digital brains? Because humans made it and. Yeah, it just feels strange.
23:16 Speaker 01 Medium is not unique in opting out. We're sort of maybe unique in engaging our community in it. But you know, the number of media properties that have opted out, the number of lawsuits that are going on right now. Yeah, it's a real thing. The logic that I don't understand is if AI is real, which like, like it really is going to matter in the industry.
23:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:34 Speaker 01 Then it's going to be a battle for quality, right? I mean, that logic seems logical to me. And so if it's a battle for quality, they're going to need to compete for access to the best training data. So if the best training data starts opting out of individual companies, right, then what's going to happen? And so I'm actually a little bit worried about the status quo, because I would like to see an up and comer succeed. But in this case, OpenAI is essentially the up and comer, even though they're Microsoft affiliated. But the way it's working right now is Google has the advantage because we don't want to lose search engine traffic. They combine Bard and search engine, even if search engine traffic goes down, what are we going to do? Like,
24:15 Speaker 00 Wait a minute, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up. So if you opt out of Bard, you opt out of all of robots.txt from Google?
24:21 Speaker 01 Not right now, but I'm very worried that that's the direction we're going to go. And so
24:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:26 Speaker 01 Google has such an advantage because they actually have something to give, right? And they can give traffic. And they've already seen that we accept traffic as a exchange of value, right?
24:37 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:37 Speaker 01 So OpenAI can't offer that. So they could offer money instead. But it just seems like a weird battle where if people start opting out of OpenAI and opting into Google, then we're choosing winners, which I don't want to be in that position anyways. And this is, this is actually the heart of the reason why it's hard to get a coalition of platforms together. Because now it's like antitrust kind of territory.
25:00 Speaker 00 Yeah. Well, I'm, the media monopoly, watch out. The media is coming for you with its, with its layoffs and failing business models. Yeah, we're clearly too profitable, Tony.
25:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right.
25:11 Speaker 00 As a side of the world. Yeah. So, search is something that I think a lot about for two reasons. One is, I write on the internet, search matters. And two, startups depend a lot on search because they're just how they're often discovered. I mean, startups will, will have a blog, I mean, and hope to get found for certain queries and drive awareness. And it seems that as we move towards what Google has so poetically named, the search generative experience, clearly a brand name for the ages, that there's going to be less room for individual bits of writing from a startup, from a person, from anyone, to kind of like make it into the search world. And so I wonder if that lever you're describing of Google and search traffic is going to essentially be deprecated by their own work to build a new search engine model.
25:54 Speaker 00 Like, I feel like the era of Blue Links is, is really dead.
25:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, maybe. I'm hopeful it's not dead. I'll just tell you, it's in our budget to expect a 30% drop in SEO. But I don't have any hard data on that. I might be way overestimating, I might be way underestimating. Our SEO traffic is actually up right now. So, I don't know, but I definitely like, it's, I'm worried enough about it that it's in our budgets.
26:16 Speaker 00 And that's why, like, the whole push of Medium to keep growing its subscription business makes so much sense to me. Because, you know, Google giveth and Google taketh away. And if you're relying on a platform, you're always just living on bar of time. And so to me, like, the focus on SEO is like an intelligent way for publications to try to defend legacy cash flows, but I don't see it as a way forward. I don't think anyone's gonna build a next great BuzzFeed in this era. I don't think that's, I mean, social media has gotten more fragmented, more private. Search is worse and increasingly self-contained. So, it almost feels like you have to have either a massive brand to drive people to your site directly, other distribution methods, like your tech memes and so forth, in my world, or you have to have a subscriber base.
26:59 Speaker 00 And so, I almost mourn the loss of what we never had, I guess, in terms of functional online economics. But at least, at least subscriptions are doing well enough that you and I have jobs.
27:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, right. Well, I mean, it's better than that. You know, I think we often discount word of mouth. There's my boss, the founder of Medium, I was telling him about all these growth strategies at one point, different company, I've known him for a while. And he goes, pull out your phone. And he goes, tell me what growth strategy led you to download each app on your phone. And he goes, I bet you there's actually a person behind each one of them.
27:32 Speaker 00 Wow.
27:33 Speaker 01 And I think we really forget that when you actually do a great job, you tell your friends, you tell your family. You know, in some ways, maybe it's healthier if we're less reliant on growth hacking and taking advantage of the platform of the moment and get back to nuts and bolts, you know, deliver value and sell that way.
27:52 Speaker 00 Yeah. So to summarize a little bit, it sounds like the medium model has refound its legs and is growing its subscriber base.
27:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:00 Speaker 00 And growing quickly, too. You're putting the growth of TechCrunch Plus to shame, which makes me feel
28:04 Speaker 01 I'm sorry for that.
28:04 Speaker 00 feel poor at my job, I'll have to work harder. But I just want to close with this, you know, AI aside, and you know, the history of Medium aside, how optimistic are you about the future of online writing economics for most folks in the next five years?
28:18 Speaker 01 I'm super optimistic because I think a lot of the unhealthy stuff is starting to fall away. You know, these things come in fads, right? And as it falls away and as people realize, oh, the attention economy was a dead end, the attention economy is driven by ads, so let's explore other models. You know, we're not, in the beginning of the internet, it was like ads or free, you know, and free had its own limits, ads had the wrong incentives. And it's like, what if everything you kind of hate about the modern internet could be solved for $5 a month? Is that good enough for you? For a lot of people, the answer is yes. So.
28:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, I have a post somewhere in my mind that I haven't gotten out yet. Back to your point about knowing what you want to say, about how anything that depends on advertising for its long-term growth will inevitably eat all the consumer surplus it once had and eventually turn into a vampire. And yeah, that's why, I mean, honestly, I do my job at TC because it's what I got rehired to work on. But also, it's because I think it's the best way to be sure that TechCrunch remains the weird place that it is and doesn't have to become. A Diet Coke Mashable, you know, of the old, of the old day of that site. No diss to the current people that work there. So, you and I are only betting our careers on being right. So let's see how it goes. A better way to do it. And how soon are you going to come back on and talk about hitting that 1 million subscriber metric? Like, is that like next year?
29:35 Speaker 00 Is like two years from now? Is that like December? We're putting a pool together in the company right now. And if you would like to participate on background, I'll invite you in. Yeah, I'm in. Clearly, it's going to be January 13th, 2024. You're not too far off. That's a reasonable bet. Thank you. All right, Tony, thanks for coming on the show. We will talk to you more about this down the road because when it comes to AI and writing and how to do value on the internet, I am obsessed. But thank you very much. And where can folks find you online? Oh, come on. You find me on Medium. I'm Coach Tony on Medium, and that's my social media platform of choice. I was gonna say, I'm not gonna ask for your X handle here because I don't think that would be appropriate. All right, thank you, everybody. Equity is back on Friday morning. We'll see you then. Until then, stay cool.
30:20 Speaker 00 Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter, Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator. And a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
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