Wordpress powers about a third of the web and Automattic has a significantly higher valuation than Medium. Maybe Medium's cooler, but it's not more successful.
But they aren’t more successful through the blog platform, instead by providing website foundation most companies use to create company websites, e-commerce websites and, a few of them, blogs.
> But they aren’t more successful through the blog platform, instead by providing website foundation most companies use to create company websites, e-commerce websites and, a few of them, blogs.
The blog platform provided the very foundation for their success because once people found out how easy it was, relative to the competition[0], to stand up an online presence using WordPress, you could "convert" the blog into an e-commerce website or a CMS or anything you can think of that needs to spit out HTML/CSS/JS, via the use of free/paid WordPress plugins.
[0] WordPress' competition included a wide variety of product categories apart from Movable Type, which used to be the dominant open source blogging platform. From dedicated CMS products like Joomla or Drupal or Plone, to dedicated e-commerce products like OsCommerce.
WordPress fit nicely in the middle of these product categories due to its vibrant plugin community and focus on ease of use (at the cost of security), which is part of why it became popular.
Automattic isn't just wordpress. But even if wordpress is more successful, the fact that medium had any success at all, even though wordpress already existed proves that medium did something right.
Pyra Labs (Blogger) was Evan Williams earlier adventure and Google acquired it in 2003. Evan Williams later went on to co-found Twitter and in 2012, founded Medium. I checked Crunchbase and as of 2016 they’ve taken on $132M across 3 funding rounds and as of at least last year, they are not profitable[1].
I remember the buzz around Medium back when it launched, Ev Williams was going to try and do something new and exciting with text and don’t call it a blog platform, it’ll be like Twitter but with longer form text and anyone could write for it, etc.
The reading experience was good, it did (and probably still does, but I don’t read anything on Medium anymore) have an interesting take on comments, and anyone could write for it. But it’s a blog platform. It is Ev Williams second crack at Blogger with some of the lessons of Twitter, and the conceit that by locking up enough authors into a kind of Yahoo-style lobster trap[2], they can sell themselves as the New York Times[3] by being a kind of YouTube for text.
The thing about YouTube is that videos are relative to text, expensive to encode, decode, store and distribute, and YouTube has an audience that goes to YouTube to watch video. Text can be had anywhere, and while you won’t find many people that hate to watch videos, there are plenty of people that do hate to read, and Medium as it was originally conceived and before the dickbars[4] started rolling in and they had to start hacking engagement was a love letter to the typed word. It was a really really good blog platform that didn’t want to think of itself that way, and that’s why it tried to flip the model and charge readers for access rather than charge writers for hosting or premium features.
Blogger was bought out, I actually found it amazing that TypePad[5] was still around, but the “blog engine” that powers it, Movable Type is still powering sites that you’ve probably heard of, daringfireball.net and Kottke.org being two of the more famous examples with the kinds of writers/bloggers I was advocating for: people who own what they have to say, every pixel of it.
WordPress is now the biggest fish in the blogging pond in mindshare, market share and revenue for blogging software. If it’s a blog and it’s not someone’s custom static site generator or Movable Type on the backend, then it is probably using WordPress either .com or .org.
“All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say:
Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.
[5] I have lost track of where TypePad is relative to everyone else, even in its heyday it was the one platform I never signed up for because I had chosen Blogger, mind I quickly found Blogging wasn’t for me. It appears Movable Type is still actively developed, still sold, and Six Apart is now a Japanese company. TypePad has always been and still appears to be the WordPress.com to Movable Type’s WordPress.org
