Revaluing the written word online
He’s apologized for giving President Trump his personal digital bullhorn. And now, the co-founder of Twitter, Ev Williams, is trying to overturn the perverse economics of the ad-funded web that helped make him a billionaire. Williams’ six-year-old startup Medium is engineered to reward quality and repel the clickbait and hyperbole that can swell a Twitter fan base. At Medium, audience “claps,” only by paying users, help allocate payments to writers. Williams spoke with The Associated Press about his change of heart.
You grew up on a farm in Nebraska, a state with a lot of beef, and became a vegetarian. Were you always a rebel?
I was always attracted to ideas that were contrarian. Having grown up where I did, I got a ton of ideas from books and just reading. That’s why the internet excited me when it did. Written knowledge is super powerful and it can actually change how you live.
You started an internet business with your dad and brother, right?
We were focused on CD-ROMs at first. The one thing we ended up shipping was the “Multimedia Encyclopedia of Husker Football.” It wasn’t the biggest hit. We pivoted from there to the internet pretty quickly.
Before Twitter, you started Blogger, one of the first web publishing tools for individuals. Why?
At first, it was just a simple little hack. Then it was, ‘Oh, this is about the democratization of publishing.’ It was a much bigger vision. It became basically what I’ve been thinking about ever since.
Your holding company is called The Obvious Corporation. Where did the name came from?
The phrase, ‘All great ideas are obvious in retrospect’ was just something I said. I also thought a lot about design and user experience. People talk a lot about how things should be intuitive. I thought maybe they should be obvious. They don’t intuit how something works, as much as, just make it clear how it works. Obvious is a good attribute to shoot for.
Describe your team’s decision to turn Medium from an ad-funded business to a reader-funded one last year.
The best media is almost always paid for by the person who is consuming it. There’s general acknowledgement in the publishing world that ads alone aren’t going to cut it. We’ve got to find a way to charge people so it’s not advertisers we’re serving.
Will paid media work for all publishers?
It’s working for us. I don’t think it’s going to work for most websites. It’s too high friction and too distributed. Very few people are going to pay for dozens of subscriptions. What the internet has taught us is that making things simpler for consumers is critical. Simplicity, seamlessness and convenience win every time.