Farewell to ThinkGrowth.org
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tl;dr Medium’s monetization strategy has shifted away from publications and toward subscriptions. Because of this, we no longer see a growth path as a publication on Medium, but we will continue to publish content on HubSpot’s Medium handle.
I’ve been running HubSpot’s Medium publication, ThinkGrowth.org, for over two years. It’s been an entertaining ride. Medium has gone through several major strategic shifts and we’ve watched the platform evolve in a way that’s hard to do when your hands aren’t deep in the work.
What is clear today is that Medium’s subscription strategy is working, and it’s unlikely Medium will back away from it anytime soon. But as Medium continues down the subscription path we’re seeing it increasingly back away from supporting publications:
- Late in 2017, Medium removed custom domain capabilities. While existing custom domains are still supported, there have been indicators that this could change at any time (see the ominous “forseeable future” in the help article below.)
- Earlier this year, Medium stopped allowing publications to run their own membership programs.
- And throughout the year, we watched as increasing real-estate on Medium’s homepage went to driving traffic to subscriber-only content vs. publications.
Medium is turning into the powerful publication it always dreamed of being, and publications hosted on the platform are no longer part of that long-term growth strategy.
What that means for us
So for HubSpot, it’s time to wrap up the ThinkGrowth.org project. Stories currently part of the publication will remain as they are, but we will no longer be accepting new stories.
Keep in mind, this does not mean we are giving up on Medium. Medium still has an incredibly engaged audience that we want to get in front of and you will continue to find content by our team on HubSpot’s Medium handle and it’s likely you’ll see us pop up on other publications around Medium. We’re just no longer investing in growing our own publication on Medium.
We will, of course, continue to invest in growing the HubSpot blogs and serving the 5M+ visitors who read content on those publications every month.
If you have any questions about this move, tweet at me.
And a huge thank you to all of our writers and contributors over the past two years…
- Pamela Rosario Pérez, the author of our best-performing post ever (nearly 250,000 views)
- Steve Blank, our most prolific contributor (39 articles)
- The many HubSpotters who contributed content (Sara DeBrule, Nataly Kelly, Marcus Andrews, Corey Eridon, Laurie (Aquilante) Faiola, Dharmesh Shah, and Will DeKrey to name only a few)
And so many others who are just delightful humans who I am happy to have had the chance to work with–Matt Ward, Margo Aaron, Jessica Dubin, Owen Williams, Bogdan Florin Ceobanu, Sarah E. Brown, Avtar Ram Singh, to name only a few–working with all of you has been an absolute pleasure.
