Terrific and succinct observation. How does competition not prevent this? Does lock-in prevent competition? e.g. Medium's suck-factor will always hover at the level where it's just not quite worth it to use something else if you already have many posts on Medium. New users will still pick Medium because it sucks, but is still popular/accepted.
The remarkable thing about Medium was that it went downhill so quickly, or, compared to other platforms like Twitter, it started trying to make money early in the process of gathering an audience, which limited it's growth.
In my mind it never had a good reputation. Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot, (2) technically running your blog, and (3) promoting your blog. In principle Medium took (2) and (3) out of your hands so you could focus on (1) but I think Medium attracted a person who was too lazy to blog before and who is interested in working on (1) as little as they are on (2) and (3).
In principle you might make some money blogging on Medium but a lot of people blog to promote themselves or their business and the registration wall reduced their reach and actually damaged their personal brand because I think a lot of people felt it was annoying to have to register to read articles on a blogging platform that is just a bit worse than the rest of the web as opposed to just a bit better. (Certainly anyone whose Medium blog posts connected with someone has received an email telling them it's a shame that a good blogger is blogging on Medium)
In the case of blogging, writing is (typically) one's product. Writing is relatively cheap and depending on the subject is highly commoditized, so you need to write a lot to incentivize audiences to return and to continue to consume, and presumably pay you somehow.
This isn't always the case. You might be an otherwise famous individual who will have an audience regardless of your publishing frequency. But I think for most bloggers, you have to have enough material that people will visit, and continue to make more so people will come back.
I published between 1 and 3 times a year on my blog/website. But then I'm not doing it for income.
Quite a bit. I would say my blog has been successful, but it only happened after I had written a lot, which was about 100 posts and about 150 posts in a blog that now doesn't exist.
To be successful, your need to get an audience. To get an audience, you have to either build one over time or go viral at least once. I've done both.
To build an audience over time, you need to give them a lot to read so that they won't forget you and will keep coming back.
Going viral is a luck thing, but you sure do get better chances of going viral the more you post.
My first viral post was posted on Hacker News at a time when I thought it wouldn't go viral for sure: on Saturday night (my time). I didn't want that one to go viral, but I thought I would post it anyway to attract some readers.
Oh boy.
I woke up the next morning to a headache.
Since then, when I want to make an impact, I post during my nighttime. Turns out, posting that on a Saturday night was perfect because my most viral posts have been, with one or two exceptions.
But I wouldn't have been able to sample that enough to know if I didn't have 50-100 (tech-oriented) blog posts to try with.
I find there are two types of writers - ones who are working on a massive tome or tomes of perfection (often in their are of expertise) and those who are writing about a ton of different things.
The second definitely improves with consistent output. I assume the first does too, but they often are continually revising their “masterpiece” so it can be harder to see
Its an empirical rule of thumb that to build an audience online, post at least once a week (more often for low-effort posts for smartphones). If you can think of any well-known online writers who do not post a lot, I think you will find they generally had an existing audience (eg. Paul Graham is a venture capitalist with a crowd of admirers). Rules of thumb are not laws of nature, but this one matches my experience and my observations.
There's a wonderful blog post I want to find from years back about Starbucks switching from manual to automatic espresso machines, saying how the next generation of good coffee shops are probably getting their start by buying those manual machines cheap. And more generally, the cycle is that for a new brand having a few people who love you is more important than having people who don't hate you, so you take risks, and then at some point you're mainstream and that flips and it's more important to not be hated.
I'd add to that that brand reputation is monetisable and monetised. It's almost a playbook at this point: sell something high quality to people who are really into that thing, get a good reputation, then dilute the quality down and you can coast on that reputation for a while while selling cheaper versions at the original high prices to a much wider audience.
I don't know what the counter to this is, other than customers paying much more attention to when a brand changes their products, which would not be free for them.
Competition doesn't generally apply because these are usually venture-backed companies in the first few stages. The point is to prevent competition in the third stage by using the first two stages to lock in both sides of the market.
