Medium failed because their execution was poor.
Monetizing a blog with a paywall is dumb, because it increases the friction of people reading your content. Usually you blog to build a profile, which you can't do if you erect barriers to your audience.
Monetizing newsletters makes more sense because you already know who and what you are paying for. Substack poached high profile journalists and bloggers to write newsletters for their platform. They paid upfront. That said, I don't know if Substack is making enough revenue to survive long term. They only made $9M on a $650M valuation last year. There seems to be increasing burnout with news engagement these days due to years of outrage and disappointment.
Surprise surprise subscriptions added to much friction and people stopped linking so the conversation moved elsewhere.
> Medium, a publishing platform that sought to split the difference between blogs and tweets: medium-length posts, [...]
For me, I think it failed because we end up with shallow posts that split the difference between a tweet and a blog. Monetization/paywalls may have accelerated it.
It's the same as anything else, once you remove all the barriers to entry most of the content is trash. The value of any content platform is being able to surface quality relevant content. Medium doesn't have any mechanisms for this so isn't better than anything else.
