Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Why Medium Failed to Disrupt the Media

A social media billionaire finds himself in traditional publishing purgatory for the same old reasons.

January 5, 2017 at 7:02 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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Photographer: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

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Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, spent five years building Medium into one of the slickest publishing platforms on the web. Yet he found himself in traditional-publishing purgatory on Wednesday, cutting 50 employees and searching for a new business model. There could be no better proof that delivery methods matter little and content is king.

In the post outlining the changes, Williams explained that he had lost faith in advertising: