""It was doing terribly," he says matter of factly."
""That's what we call the attention economy," Stubblebine says. "The incentive structure is like, the more you can drive attention, the more ads you can show, the more money you can make, the healthier your business.""
""Just personally, I don't want to see more really angry, emotional content that drives division," he says. "Often, it's just so much clickbait, ragebait - all that. ... We thought the opportunity is for us to offer an alternative.""
Tony Stubblebine became CEO of Medium in 2022 when the platform was losing more than $2.5 million monthly, shedding subscribers, and lacking product-market fit. He improved content quality by removing low-quality clickbait and implemented deep cost-cutting measures including layoffs, reduced server expenses, and investor loan restructurings. Medium remained ad-free while focusing on growing subscriptions and refining the product. The company reached profitability in summer 2024. The decision to avoid advertising reflected concerns about the attention economy driving clickbait, ragebait, and divisive content. The strategy emphasized white-hat marketing and prioritizing high-quality human-created writing over AI-generated low-quality content.
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