After experimenting with cross-posting to various platforms over the last few weeks, I thought it might not be amiss to scribble down a few thoughts about the platforms I’ve been cross-posting to, should anybody else consider doing something similar.
Tumblr
In the late 2000s, Tumblr was a mighty force — a melting pot of the “social internet”, where millions emptied their head through text, photos, quotes, GIFs, and more — a torrent of both the vital and the inconsequential.
Under David Karp’s stewardship, Tumblr was very much the anti-hero of the Web 2.0 explosion — fighting censorship and oppression at every turn.
Today, following sell-outs to first Yahoo and then Automattic, Tumblr seems a little lost, and a pale shadow of it’s former self. In and of itself it hasn’t changed — Automattic have worked hard to restore it to former glories — but much of the community that could once be found there has moved on to the innumerable social platforms that followed.
Substack
Over the last several years Substack have seemed hell-bent on disrupting the online publishing industry — creating a straight-forward runway for authors to monetise content, and offering perhaps best-in-class email subscription functionality for free.
The only problem with Substack is a similar one to Medium. They have invested heavily in paying luminaries of the writing and journalism fields to fill their platform with wonderful content — selling the dream of rubbing shoulders with the authors and columnists you’ve been reading for decades. Medium pulled the same trick several years ago.
I don’t think most authors chasing the idea of paid subscribers realise how much work is required in marketing their words in order to draw a subscription base large enough to make any sort of respectable return. Substack will not sell the existence of your writing for you.
Don’t get me wrong — Substack is brilliant. The platform is iterating quickly, and disrupting the status quo at every turn. I think perhaps the only problem is so many become disenfranchised that they are not attracting readers by the simple existence of their words on the platform. Marketing yourself is hard work.
Medium
Several years ago, Medium set out to disrupt online publishing — providing a platform through which beautiful articles could be authored, curated, and collected into publications, with an interesting revenue model where authors could pay to put their writing behind a pay-wall, and earn a slice of the subscription fees of paying readers through their interaction with said writing.
It worked wonderfully, and through the example set by a number of in-house publications, Medium seemed to have solved the problem of marketing too. I had several articles go viral, read by tens of thousands of people — some of whom became subscribers to me, rather than just the publications they had discovered me within.
Medium’s problems have been two-fold.
Similarly to Substack, Medium paid well known writers and organisations significant retainers to use the platform. While this attracted enormous interest, it also created a “them and us” dynamic between those with retainers, and those without.
Perhaps the bigger problem has been the significant number of authors that set out to game the revenue model — churning out articles like a sausage machine — relentlessly filling the platform with posts selling the dream of how “you too can make a living as an author”.
Of course along the way the venture capital that funded the integration of various tent-pole publications and their leading writers into the Medium platform has ran dry, and the platform has slowly become a huge barrel of paying fish writing articles targetted at each other — eating each other’s food.
Wordpress
While every other platform comes and goes — disrupting, promising, standing in the sun for a while, and then quietly falling into shadow — Wordpress quietly continues.
Wordpress was here in the beginning, and it will probably be here in the end. If often-quoted statistics are correct, various versions of Wordpress support 40% or more of the “published Web”.
The one thing that differentiates Wordpress from the various disruptors is that Automattic never set out to build a platform in and of itself; they set out to build the infrastructure on which a platform could be built — and to support that infrastucture they set out a foundation to stand the test of time. Quite literally: “The Wordpress Foundation”.
Automattic has a long history of “doing the right thing” — of slowly iterating the Wordpress blogging platform, and making it available in a number of ways — among them as a PHP script to be installed on a webserver, and as a hosted service where anybody can sign up and have a blog of their own in minutes.
Back in the day I ran my own webserver with Wordpress installed. When “wordpress.com” (the hosted service) came about, I switched pretty quickly. I didn’t want to be spending my time updating web servers, or upgrading Wordpress each time a new version was launched. I just wanted to write.
The huge benefit Wordpress has over any other solution has always been that it’s a known quantity. You can buy books on Wordpress. Entire blogs and YouTube channels exist, teaching newcomers how to build out their web presence, and how best to use the tools at their disposal. For a time Automattic even dabbled with “Wordpress University”.
It’s hard to draw a line between “Wordpress”, and “the Web”, such is it’s ubiquity. It really is everywhere — and not without good reason.
My only misgiving is about wordpress.com — the hosted service. If you stand far enough away, you realise that wordpress.com is a walled garden just like any other — blogs hosted there typically only attract readers that also write on the platform. It’s the age old story about marketing again — that no platform is going to expend effort on your behalf to attract readers — it’s on you to do that.