Hamish McKenzie noted that Medium had become significantly more of a curated experience  in its recent facelift. But I think in his positioning of Medium and Flipboard as two competitors for our attention, he misses something important

He concludes with:

“I find it interesting that Tumblr seems to be changing so slowly — hardly at all — since being acquired by Yahoo. And one of the obvious ways to draw more interest to Tumblr would be the simple avenue of making the curated topics a/ public and b/ better looking. Right now they look like the (relatively unappealing) Tumblr dashboard, and there is little or no room for advertisements.”

“But I have made several of the curated topic feeds — like Tech and Design — a part of my central daily practice. I have not done that with Medium, although I do use Flipboard every day, too”

You can read the whole post by going to: http://stoweboyd.com/post/69485777176/medium-becomes-more-tumblrish

My response to this is:

I am one of the Tumblr tech curators/editors and I am not sure about how I feel regarding advertising on the curated areas of Tumblr. On the one hand I can understand the appeal and like Stowe have made looking at the curated areas part of my daily information practice. I can also understand that the service needs to make money to sustain itself and I am supportive of that as long as it is done in a way that is not intrusive on the reader/community. On the other hand I am somewhat leery of Tumblr/Yahoo making money on top of my voluntary efforts. I would need to balance off that against my view of my contribution to the community and also any value I feel the extra profile of a public and promoted page may do for me and our business.

This is the delicate balance of some of these new business models where the community is producing the product. Too delicate an economic business model may imperil the economic viability of the service, and too intrusive a model may damage the goodwill of the community and therefore make the whole thing evaporate or at least to a level that is non viable. Fundamentally I think that this is easier outside of a large company where transparency can allow the community to make finer grained judgements about the economic model and what it is delivering as long as it is transparent. That is much harder inside a larger company that tends not to publish data on the individual performance of its parts in a way that is clear for everyone to see.

I would be interested in comments.

Paul Higgins