The Platform that will Disrupt Medium has been Born
Every.to
This is the first article of Future Media, a new journal that lives in the architecture at the top of Creator Economy Tips.
I discovered tonight while stomping around my usual places like Hacker News, in a simple article.
The article was the kind of clickbait you would ordinarily see on Medium, but it felt different. The aesthetics were a bit more branded. I did not recognize the URL: this is what I saw.
https://every.to/divinations/dall-e-2-and-the-origin-of-vibe-shifts
On going to the site, I immediately realized this was the Medium clone that would displace it. The article was so ridiculous, comparing OpenAI’s creation to a vibe shift in the aesthetics of websites that occurred a few years ago. But mixed in the clickbait was a swirl of aesthetics to make the article seem better than it actually was.
We all know about the Mess at Medium, and the death of content quality there, even while SEO continues to rule the land. Anyways the founder used to write on Substack. What I discovered was a nicer looking Medium also with a bundle to enter the ecosystem.
The pitch is also very pastel and collaborative fit for the Web 3.0.
Think things through
A bundle of newsletters and podcasts
trusted by 40,000+ curious business people.
It appears I had never heard of Nathan before, who was VP of Substack before he ditched them to found his own, his own Medium.
This is all rather shocking, I was not looking for this.
Nathan (and Dan) call this project a “Writer’s Collective”. Not news but opinions. It really thus is a Medium clone for the ages. Sorry Ev this is going to be the one that kills you, I can sort of tell.
As a blogger I’ve seen it all, I’ve had a wordpress, blogged on LinkedIn, blogged on Tumblr, Xanga and experienced many sites like Medium. Medium never treated its writers or Creators very well. These platforms typically don’t, but now with the Creator Economy vibe, I think Every is trying to say that the vibe shift favors them over Medium.
Dall-E 2 has seriously nothing to do with it.
You want to see a real fucking demo of Dall-E, go here.
Anyways, I really dislike it when product people think they are writers or Creators. Except, that’s exactly what Nathan did, early in 2020, they launched the Everything Bundle, a Substack devoted to productivity and business strategy. They started with two newsletters, Superorganizers and Divinations, written and produced by just them. I knew this story was going to sort of piss me off.
After 10 months as a collection of newsletters created via Substack, the team behind the Everything Bundle broke out on its own with $600,000 in seed funding, its own content and newsletter software built in-house, and a refreshed brand as Every. Tada! and they have certainly evolved. They evolved enough for me to say that this is the Medium-killer. Medium has always been poorly managed and a Creator content farm, that felt more like a gig-economy than an on-ramp to the legit Creator Economy.
The Magazine Re-Written for the Group Soul
There seems to be a trend that when indie media collaboratives form, the chance that they will exit or spin-off becomes higher.
Every.to is going to kill Medium with kindness and collaboration. Think about it, while services like Substack have made it easier than ever to start a personal newsletter and even generate income from paying subscribers, some authors are figuring out they need more than an internet connection and writing ideas to build out their business.
Substack is great if you have 50k Twitter followers up your sleeve or have a network from years working as a Journalist. (my quote)
Nathan doesn’t have to be the prince of Vibe changes of Dall-E 2, like Karen is the rightful princess, he just has to make a product that’s better than Medium. That’s not so hard in 2022, there’s room for Medium, Substack, Ghost, Bulletin, LinkedIn, Revue, Every.to and any number of Creator Economy writing platforms.
Every.to is going to kill Medium, with better aesthetics. Just ask Dan. According to Axios in early 2021, Nathan and Dan were able to pull some Substack writers along for the ride. After an explosion of newsletters from solo writers in the past year (this was 2020), a small-but-growing number are leaving Substack as they become more full-fledged media outfits whose needs when it comes to their tools are no longer served by the company.
The laughable part is even in the graphics, there’s a definite resemblance to Medium. I have no problems saying the design has aspects of looking like a clone. Haha, it’s hilarious!
The Every Collective - Hive
Axios back in early 2021 explained it like this, and I’m not sure if it’s still the same:
How it works: At Every, which describes itself as a "writer collective," writers are autonomous, but get access to resources like editors, and content gets a quality review from Shipper and Baschez to ensure it meets basic standards.
Nascent writers first begin as freelance contributors to existing newsletters, and can later build their own newsletter as part of the bundle for paying subscribers.
In that case, every will pay them about half of the subscriber revenue they bring in to the company, which the company determines by asking subscribers to identify which writer's work they've primarily signed up to read.
"We want to measure who would leave with you if you left the bundle," says Shipper to describe the metric the company refers to as "marginal churn contribution."
Every also works out custom minimum monthly payments with those writers if they need a guarantee to offset income they'd be losing if they pursue a newsletter. It also works out custom agreements with writers who already have an existing newsletter with a paying audience.
So it’s some quasi-entrepnreural model that could displace Medium, in the scheme of churning out gig-economy writers. At least he has a more appealing approach than say Ghost or Revue, which do nothing for me not even a vague interest.
The fact that there is this collective structure and this hierarchy is a bit perplexing. When Medium had its in-house publications, it too felt a bit like this with a bunch of outside contributors and where you could barely get entry into their magazine style publications. The Editors were just impossible to work with and the Chief Editor had a vision that certainly wasn’t practical, nor profitable it turns out.
It appears on Every.to they are calling them Newsletters and there are Podcasts as well.
Nathan’s last post on Substack was December 12th, 2019. Nathan has also written for a16z’s Future, which means he’s also likely in bed with them. a16z can totally corner Medium’s market with Substack and Every.to. Ev is going to have a fit when he realizes this is inevitable. However Ev badly mismanaged what Medium could have become. This is just my personal opinion.
Anyways you learn something new about the future of media when you are an amateur futurist like I am. I stumbled on this entirely by chance and the power of my observation.
In a world of OnlyFans, Patreon, Substack, Teachable, Twitch - is there room for Every.to? I might even have to start a trial. It’s 4am so I’m just going to hit publish on this one.
I’ve read so many Manifestos, I can only believe the Creator Platform will be a utopia of many niches. Every.to says:
We believe business
writing can be Beautiful.So we’re building a writer collective that we hope
will one day cover every industry, every job
function, and every topic of interest in business.
The Rise of Entrepreneur Journalism and Selling Words on a Pretty Palate
As for me, I really do believe there is room for everyone. With enough diversification, deals and hustle, Creators can somehow make a living wage. I don’t mind the cursive and the pastels much.
Medium was founded in 2012.
Substack was founded in 2017.
Every was founded likely in January, 2020.
So who really followed Nathan from Substack to Every.to, I’m not sure? But winning substacks sometimes leave: Defector Media, A Media Operator, The Generalist, among others. What is Lede anyway?
Do you Believe in an Everyman’s Bundle? Darling!
As Nathan and Dan built something in their “Everything Bundle” that was read by over 750,000 people, with almost 2,400 paid subscribers, and had cracked the top 10 on Substack’s paid newsletter leaderboard. - they decided it was time to become Every.
Their model allows the quality to remain relatively high (in their opinion, I have yet to verify this) in writing guilds in a sense covering a range of topics.
You know like voices you love - all for one price (a sales pitch).
The thing is in 2022, I don’t need to do much research to see that the model works.
What they’re saying: "It's always an exciting point when a company is proposing a new model to give writers a new model for writing on the internet," Bedrock Capital managing partner Eric Stromberg tells Axios of the firm's lead investment in Every.
Fast forward a couple of years, and they have attracted some talent and an audience, now they just have to learn how to scale. The product market fit is good, good enough to continue.
It’s cool that a Substack can become an indie media platform! However you feel about off-shoots, to some extent they are inevitable. Why Substack let him build a following while he was VP of Product is beyond me! This happened with early Medium product people as well. It’s kind of dumb management to be honest. It’s a conflict of interest. It also can get to their head.
Every.to ironically is what Medium’s in-house publications would have likely have become hadn’t Ev pulled the plug on their initiative when they couldn’t get 1 million paying subs in that ridiculous time frame. The resemblance is uncanny!
Our business wouldn’t exist without Substack, and we think the world of them.
For every startup, there’s a story. Sadly the story of indie media is a platform war of many medias. Who knows what else Substack might spawn.
Postscript: So that’s where Li Jin went.
Are writer collectives on Every.to, really somewhere between the New York Times and writing on Substack? That’s hard to believe. Whatever it is, it deserves watching, as I cover everything in the Creator Economy’s evolution. Either way, it seems as if indie media companies feel the need to being re-bundled in new ways that need new tools and structures. They call it evolution, I call it re-branding.
They make you think they are doing something exceptional or that their quality is very high or that their model is somehow ground-breaking.
An editorial structure that balances centralization and decentralization.
A financial structure that balances risk and reward.
I’m going to have to think things through. Sometimes that’s Best.
Edit: I’ve though about it, and Every.to was most likely a16z’s idea to begin with. Web 3.0 can be totally gamed.
Chris Dixon 1 Medium 0. My condolences to OneZero. lmao.
