# Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? Tony Stubblebine (Medium CEO) NEW ECONOMIES · 2026-05-06 Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium, argues the creator economy is ending as AI slop floods public channels, but a writing renaissance is emerging where authentic expertise and private communities hold value. He details Medium's turnaround from losing $2.5M per month and $37M in debt to profitability, achieved by restructuring investor relationships and refocusing on human-written content. Stubblebine warns that AI companies like OpenAI created a 'prisoner's dilemma' by scraping content without compensation, pushing high-quality writing into walled gardens. He introduces Medium's new AI-assisted writing app TK and private blogging groups as responses to the era. The episode explores how creators must diversify revenue streams and reinvent themselves, while per-inference pricing standards like RSL slowly develop. ## Questions this episode answers ### How did Medium go from losing $2.5 million a month to becoming profitable? Tony Stubblebine explains that when he became CEO, Medium was losing $2.5 million monthly, had $27 million in debt, and an expensive San Francisco office. He led a financial restructuring, renegotiated with investors to clear debt and liquidation preferences, cut costs, and focused on subscription growth. The company turned profitable by August 2024. [19:30](https://neweconomies.podhood.com/38143ca5-c992-468d-9aed-f0a174f83c58?t=1170000) ### What evidence suggests high-quality content is going private due to AI, according to Medium's CEO? Tony Stubblebine reveals that 4% of Medium authors have opted to block Google's AI scraper, even at the cost of losing search traffic. He interprets this as a sign that creators, frustrated by uncompensated scraping, will increasingly move content to private, walled-garden spaces, which could ultimately devalue AI models reliant on public data. [34:13](https://neweconomies.podhood.com/38143ca5-c992-468d-9aed-f0a174f83c58?t=2053000) ### Is the creator economy dying, and what does Tony Stubblebine predict will replace it? Stubblebine contends the creator economy as we know it is ending due to saturation and unsustainable content treadmills. He forecasts a shift to an 'expert economy' where AI tools enable busy professionals to share high-quality insights, sparking a writing renaissance that values authenticity and timeless utility over mass-produced content. [46:32](https://neweconomies.podhood.com/38143ca5-c992-468d-9aed-f0a174f83c58?t=2792000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Intro** - **[2:04] New Media** - [2:49] Google's free search traffic to content sites dropped by roughly 50%, says Tony Stubblebine. - [3:45] "Every platform is only talking about AI slop right now" — Tony Stubblebine. - [4:34] Writing is about a year behind programming in adopting AI-assisted tools, predicts Tony Stubblebine. - **[5:22] Content Quality** - **[8:46] New Media Era** - [8:46] OpenAI acquired live tech show TVPN for $200 million, notes Ollie Forsyth. - **[12:19] Medium's Founding** - [13:22] Medium founder Evan Williams previously created Blogger and Twitter, shaping modern internet publishing, says Tony Stubblebine. - [14:56] Medium struggled to make an open subscription bundle work, a model never done before in publishing, says Tony Stubblebine. - [18:47] Medium went from losing $2.5 million a month to profitable by August 2024, says Tony Stubblebine. - **[19:26] Lowest Era** - [19:47] Medium had $27 million in debt, $225 million in liquidation preferences, and a $135K/month empty SF office during COVID, says Ollie Forsyth. - [21:26] Medium was at risk of bankruptcy if debt holders chose to enforce repayment, reveals Tony Stubblebine. - [24:48] VC Mark Suster's blog post "Clean Up Your Own Shite First" guided Tony Stubblebine to lead Medium's own recap. - [25:45] Mark Suster told Tony Stubblebine that a CEO must threaten to quit to force a financial recap. - [27:15] After restructuring, Medium became like "a Series A startup on top of a 10-year-old asset," says Tony Stubblebine. - **[27:32] Toughest Moments** - **[31:42] AI Concerns** - [31:42] Q: Are AI models going to destroy content creators? Tony Stubblebine: "We're at the end of the creator economy as we know it." - [32:22] AI companies created a prisoner's dilemma by taking value without compensation from day one, says Tony Stubblebine. - [32:44] Tony Stubblebine's household received $1,000 from Anthropic as part of compensation for books used in training. - [33:50] Google will win AI search and Anthropic will win enterprise AI, predicts Tony Stubblebine. - [34:33] Content is increasingly going private as a response to AI scraping, says Tony Stubblebine. - [35:22] 4% of Medium authors block Google's AI scraper despite losing search traffic, reports Tony Stubblebine. - **[41:00] Creator Compensation** - [41:00] Q: How will creators be compensated by AI models? Tony Stubblebine: Per-inference pricing standards like RSL are emerging but too slowly. - [43:46] The creator life requires constant reinvention, says Tony Stubblebine, citing artists adapting from tapes to TikTok. - **[46:12] Creator Economy?** - [46:38] The creator economy is cresting its hype cycle due to saturation and high failure rates, says Tony Stubblebine. - [47:42] Tony Stubblebine's habit app Lyft revealed "work on a secret project" as the #4 most tracked habit, showing desire for independence. - [49:56] Tony Stubblebine used AI tools to outline a book from his 6,000-item note corpus in 15-minute sessions. - **[51:53] Next 12 Months** - [52:15] Medium will launch TK, a social AI writing app, and private writing groups within months, says Tony Stubblebine. ## Speakers - **Ollie Forsyth** (host) - **Tony Stubblebine** (guest) ## Topics AI, Creator Economy, Consumer & Community ## Mentioned Anthropic (company), Google (company), Medium (company), OpenAI (company), Substack (company), Twitter (company), Blogger (product), ChatGPT (product), Claude (product), Edbot (product), Gemini (product), TK (product) ## Transcript ### Intro **Tony Stubblebine** [0:00] We're at the end of the creator economy as we know it. Once you get into the reality of it, there's a lot of failure. And then, at the same time, AI just makes the content mill more accessible to more people. They're more prolific. But the content is more generic, debased, less and less valuable. And so we're actually in a writing renaissance where writing is more important because it's more useful. I've been in media or adjacent to it for so long, and I think we're just in a new era. So it's like every platform is only talking about AI slopright now. But I think that what the AI companies are just starting to realize is they kind of created this prisoner's dilemma situation by coming out of the gate defecting on day one. The way that the Google scraper works is either you say, "Yes, you can train on my content," or you don't get search traffic. What are you going to do about it? One of the trends is that content's going to go private. In a lot of ways, those conversations are more valuable, more authentic, they're safer. And so Google's just screwing themselves. And that's true for all of these AI companies because they do need ongoing access to the latest high-quality information. And if the public internet turns to slop, there's no value to that. **Ollie Forsyth** [1:09] Is the creator economy even a thing anymore? **Tony Stubblebine** [1:11] The ecosystem changes so often. We feel the impact and we're not getting compensated. The people that have a defensible position in this new media ecosystem are people that are doing. **Ollie Forsyth** [1:25] Tony, welcome to New Economies. We've Lucy been in touch for about a year now, and wow, God, so much has been happening in this new media space and AI, and we have so much to talk about. So welcome to the show. **Tony Stubblebine** [1:39] It's a big deal to be here. And I think, yeah, let's talk about stuff, hopefully, that people have never heard. **Ollie Forsyth** [1:46] So before you came on, we said this is going to be the best episode, and we have so much to talk about. And I feel, for the audience, this whole media and AI category, it is moving so quickly. What is new media? And help us unpack what is actually happening in the media landscaperight now. ### New Media **Tony Stubblebine** [2:11] Yeah, I think we're just in a new era. This is the, you know, if you've been on the internet for a while, there's the Web 1.0, Web 2.0, probably called mobile. There's a couple of eras that didn't pan out. But this is the AI era. Everything changed. And like, I think if you're in content or media at all, probably the headline is your business model has to change because Google's traffic disappeared. And so it's like you forget how much of the public internet, or maybe none of us have even really acknowledged how much of the public internet was just propped up by free traffic from Google. And it's like, you know, like no one else in the world, no other type of business gets free customers. They always have to advertise for it, or they have to be in theright location. Like we, the whole internet is built on the idea that we all get customers for free because Google was sending us customers for free. And that didn't disappear, but it went way down. Let's say 50%, you know, just as a rule of thumb. And then you're dealing like the kind of the production costs of content changed in a way that at first was kind of awful. It's like the production cost of high-quality content still incredibly high, while the production cost of trash like dropped to near zero. So it's like every platform is only talking about AI slopright now. And like, you know, I just, like, as the CEO of Medium, I'm like, how do I redesign Medium for a different business model? Because we don't get as much free traffic. How do I redesign Medium so that I can pull human content out of AI slop? Like also, like we were partway there, but we had to go further. Just like, and then, and then that's just like everyone kind of is starting this era in a bad mood,right? It's like our business model went away and we're getting swarmed by spammers, essentially,right? And then we're coming out of that. This is what actually is most exciting to me is we're coming out of that, finally starting to see like, oh, what's good,right? And I think that probably writing, which is what I care about, like we can talk about media, but I just think the written language is the most important technology humans have ever invented. And I love to write. I love to help people write. But I think there's a thing that we think, which is probably writing is about a year behind what programming was in terms of using AI-assisted tools. And so if you talk to a programmerright now, they're talking about Gastown and agents and like, and multiple like streams and that, and they're burning out because they're so productive in what they're able to do. And, you know, it's like, well, what is that going to mean for writing? Is it going to mean that we're able to hear, hopefully, I hope it means we're able to hear from experts who were previously too busy and that we're going to get more people online, more people kind of sharing their lives in a written format, which is again, what I care about. **Ollie Forsyth** [5:22] Exactlyright. And before you came on, we mentioned this new era of new media, you know, is content starting to become just good timing, timeless, it's all about taste. But when I see so many of these newsletters now, when 30, 50% of the actual content is AI-generated, I'm kind of like, where do those newsletters go? ### Content Quality **Ollie Forsyth** [5:47] You know, I'll give you an idea. There's been this whole trend around how to use Claude, the ultimate guide to Claude or ChatGPT. And I just put it for a checker, and 50% of it is written by ChatGPT. So I'm just like, if all of these prolific writers are using AI for that, there's all AI generators, what is the point? **Tony Stubblebine** [6:10] Yeah, I've always felt that this almost feels like it's a more extreme version of something I felt for a long time, is that there's this like pressure to have a barbell effect in content where on the one side is the content mill and AI just makes the content mill more accessible to more people. They're more prolific, but the content is also more generic, debased, less and less valuable. And so as it becomes less valuable, actually people react by creating more of it. It's like, you know, if I need to make a hundred dollars a month and it used to take me a hundred articles, I'm like with AI, people are perfectly willing to create 10,000 articles to get to that same dollar amount. Okay, I just like, if it's not clear, I don't give a shit about that side of the barbell. That is like not what got me excited to be on the internet. I don't think it's a good use of time, even if it made money, because I don't think it's really making the world better. The other side of the barbell is, I think, more timeless. And maybe the creator economy almost missed that before there was a creator economy, there was an expert economy. People who are using the internet not to write every day, but to write when they had learned a life lesson. And if they would able, they would turn their life lessons into valuable shared lessons that then they made money on in all the ways that experts make money. Like honestly, my blogging is what got me my job as a CEO. Like I make more as a CEO, unsurprisingly, than I did as a writer, but the writing is what advertised like who I am and what I'm good at,right? And that's true in so many occasions. So I think that the people that have kind of a defensible position in this new media ecosystem are people that are doing more than content creation. Because kind of by definition, you have to live, you know, you have to spend time living before you have something interesting to write about. Otherwise, you're just, you know, parroting things you found on the internet or things that, you know, ChatGPT can spew out for you. **Ollie Forsyth** [8:26] I agree. And you know, this whole new media space, it feels the tech ecosystem has been paying so much more attention to it in really the last two to three months. There was this acquisition, which OpenAI did, which you might know, TVPN, this live tech show, $200 million. And I mentioned before we came on, we just launched this new site called new-media.co, where we believe at some point every brand, everyone's going to be a, you know, a media player and they're going to start hiring. Companies will start hiring, you know, these heads of new media, heads of story and so on. ### New Media Era **Ollie Forsyth** [9:07] And part of me is just like this whole category is moving so quickly. How do you think we got to this new media era? Is it companies are just waking up that they have to be more relevant, they have to be building a media channel, distribution, attention, power? Is it kind of like that whole combination? **Tony Stubblebine** [9:31] Yeah, it's that, it's what I started with this idea of if we're in a new internet era, then it implies like everything's up for grabs again, including business models. And so I think people were pretty comfortable in the channels that you could grow a business before. And now they're trying to figure out, well, what are the new channels? And I, and I mean, in everything in tech, I always try to remember like what's old is new. And so, you know, like even at the beginning of this era, it was like, well, AI summaries replace human stories. And I was like kind of shrugged. I was like, well, did cliff notes replace books? No. So like what, what, what's new here that we haven't already seen? And so when you're talking about kind of storytellers as a core function of a business, what I'm hearing is timeless actually,right? That, like, because I'm hearing in particular that a business is not just like telling an entertaining story, they're telling a useful story. And that, that, the first time I ran into that idea is the first time I read How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was a hundred percent about like if you want to be a good salesperson, which is what we're talking about here,right? Is you want to be a good listener and you want to offer value. And if you can do those two things, then you have a really good chance to sell your product. And so there had been an era in what I think of as like the Web 2.0 blogging that we called like white hat content marketing, where just suddenly companies were popping up and sharing information, valuable information that you'd never heard before. I think about like 37 Signals was one of these with Basecamp and their core product, where it just, they weren't on my radar because I saw an ad for Basecamp. They were on my radar because they were talking to me about tech and how to build a company and how to build software and how to design a product in a way that I just, no one had been that transparent before. And I think that that's what people are reaching for with this head of story is, well, you know, wait a second, like can we, can we sell with value again? Can we get out there and tell really valuable stories and use that as a way to build relationships with new customers? And I'll just say like, frankly, that's my favorite way to sell,right? Because it's like, it's so, it's like, it feels good. It makes you feel good about yourself. Like you want to run a business that makes the world better. And what's like, even what's cooler than even my marketing plan makes the world better, you know, like. **Ollie Forsyth** [12:19] You know, is changing, but also the way platforms operate is also changing. And this is a good time to get into the story time. So I actually remember when Medium first started because in the first week, I dropped Evan, the original founder, a note saying, "Hey, I'm like this 15-year-old, 16-year-old, would love to connect and love to, you know, just start blogging." ### Medium's Founding **Ollie Forsyth** [12:45] And I got an email from that. I didn't remember what it said so long ago, but it feels, and I think it, maybe it's fair to say Medium has been kind of on this high up, high down, you know, kind of journey,right? I'm just going to let you describe the story on, you know, where it originally started, where did it go during COVID? You guys had a bit of a patchy time and hopefully we're now out of that and we're in new times. So the mic's over to you. What is the story of the founding story of Medium and where are we today? **Tony Stubblebine** [13:22] I mean, the story of Medium to me is the story of publishing on the internet because the founder, Evan Williams, is not just the founder of Medium. He's the founder of Blogger, which at one point was one of the 10 most trafficked sites on the entire internet. Then he was the founder of Twitter and then he was the founder of Blogger. And so from his perspective, and I think our perspective as like people on the internet that are like to write and like to publish, that like so much of our experience was basically defined by him. Like, do you know why we call it blogging? Because it was called web blogs when he started Blogger. He was just looking for domain names and he settled on Blogger because it was available. And I think that's a big reason that we even use this term. And so when he started Medium, I think he, you know, very much in like vocally is reacting to his experience of helping to make the internet a place where everyone can publish. And I think his experience, especially at Twitter, was got a little toxic,right? It's like there's, that's not why he likes to write. Writing is about sharing deep thoughts. I like to say when you blog, your wisdom becomes someone else's wisdom. And so he tried to create Medium as a place that could really be housed deep, authentic ideas and information and did a great job at that. And then Medium went sideways trying to make the business model work. And we just have almost like a Goldilocks business problem where he, and everyone in the company believes this deeply, he thought that ad-driven businesses created bad incentives for the business. It creates, you stop caring about quality and you start instead caring about attention. And so now like publishing something that's wrong, but gets a lot of attention makes you money. It's just the wrong incentive. So he said, we can't have an ad-driven business. We have to have a subscription-driven business, but we want that subscription business to be open to anyone to publish into. And that's never been done before. There's like individual sell public sell subscriptions, but there is no open subscription bundle. You know, it's like you talked to, like if you're on Substack, you have to subscribe once and twice and three times and four times and five times. On Medium, a reader subscribes one time and they get hundreds of thousands of authors all at once,right? And so in order to make that work, you have to figure out, first of all, like what is the revenue share in there? And then second of all, what are the types of writers you want? And so I think like reasonably, Medium went through a period where they thought, this is before I was there, that they should bring in a lot of professional journalists. And like the logic of it is like, hey, in order for the subscription to work, we need a lot of like super high quality, recognizably high quality. But also I think they found that that cannibalized the thing that made Medium in the first place. Like I think Medium is meant to be chaotic. You know, it's like if everyone can publish, it's going to be the Wild West. And it's our job with the subscriptions like pull stuff out. Like this is out of the million posts that just happened, these are the 10 that are going to change your life. And so, okay, so we fell into a hole, which is what you're implying. Like when I took over, we were, we had grown quite a bit, grown our subscription quite a bit, but it had started to decline because our incentives had started pulling in the opposite of what we wanted. It had like kind of gotten overrun by get rich quick creator economy types. And then, and then also our cost structure was insane. And I think this is one of the, you know, one of Ev's strengths is like truly a visionary, but also not like, not relentless about execution. And that's been always been his kind of public persona. And I mean, it was definitely true in the Medium financials. And so at some point, I made a case. It seemed like he was ready to step down and didn't want to do the business turnaround. And I was close enough, this is a whole different story of why was I so close to the company? But I was incredibly close to the company and kind of in love with Medium, not kind of like a, I was Medium's ultimate power user. Something like 2% of Medium traffic was going through some publication that I was running at that point. And I was close to Ev and I'd shared office space. I was close to a lot of people in the company. And I could see he didn't want to do the work of the turnaround. And I just used that as an opportunity to say, go do something else. Like you're ready. Like I can see that you're ready. And the thing that needs to happen here is not your wheelhouse. Like let me take your vision and let me see if I can save this company. And then we did. We went from losing two and a half million dollars a year to being a month, a month to being profitable. We've been profitable since August of 2024. And then I feel like just as I got this turnaround done, like I feel like I lucked out. The whole internet changed. We got this AI era and now we get to use like, we get to extend Medium into this new era and do completely new things. And it's like Medium is reawakening into a creative moment. Yeah. ### Lowest Era **Ollie Forsyth** [19:26] You know, when a, when a company gets restructured, there are, I don't think there's really one way on how you actually do it. There is no playbook because every company has different rights. But I think just for the audience to understand, okay, you guys were two and a half million dollars down every month, which basically means there's only so much money in the bank. And as soon as that's gone, it's gone,right? You had, it was 25, 30 million dollars, 27 million dollars in debt, debt, 225 million dollars in liquidation preferences. You had an SF office costing you something like 135K a month during COVID when no one was setting that. See, we do our research on the show. This is like a holy, holy shite moment. We are either screwed or we have an amazing opportunity and we have to turn this around now. Did you, were you aware of the actual entire situation before coming to this? **Tony Stubblebine** [20:30] I had, I had access to all the financials and when I was applying for the job actually, because the application was essentially like pitch us that this is worthwhile, you know, and the pitch had to require like actually, you know, financial modeling. Which is funny because I, you know, for the most part, I got my foot in the door by being, you know, like a super user, like basically a writer on Medium. But the work itself was financial engineering because first you have to get yourself out of a financial like profit and loss hole. And then you have to get yourself out of an investor, like a toxic investment structure. So like the, like, of course we have this liquidation preference. We have this debt that's coming due that we can't pay. It's just if the investors wanted to put us into bankruptcy, they could have. Like there's nothing we can really do there except offer them to convert it into equity. And they're not going to take that deal unless you've shown that you can improve the execution in the company. And like, I think people kind of, they forget how much you rely on relationships at the board level. And so when you get into these relationships, like you have everyone's best, like is putting their best foot forward because, you know, you're optimistic, you know, you're going to be in business for a long time. But then over time, like people, it's not worth their time to pay attention. And so they're not paying attention, which actually also makes them bad partners. So there's this one detail in there where if I wanted to make any change, major change to the company, like to sell it, to acquire something, to hire a new CEO or something like that, I would have needed to get majority approval from five different tranches of investors, all of which were different, many of which included people that weren't talking to me because it wasn't worth their time. And then I started to learn that many of those people were trying to sell their stake on to new investors. So essentially, when an investment fails for a venture capitalist, they sell it to this like bottom feeder private equity market. And it's just like, so I don't even know who I'm going to be in business with in the future if I don't get this financial, this investor restructuring done. And so, yeah, that, I mean, the good news is like, even though you don't know how to do it, like other people do and you can get help because like that's the furthest thing from any experience I'd had as a CEO going into taking over this company. **Ollie Forsyth** [23:20] Who is the, who are the people you called? Are they founders who have been through this before? Because actually this, like I said, it's an immense challenge and really the only people you have to go through this outside your investors is your team. So we should talk about that. Team morale is probably a little bit low. I'd love to learn how you also communicated this quite probably transparently. And the second is actually your users. If you don't have your users and team along this journey with you, it's difficult. **Tony Stubblebine** [23:56] Yeah, you have like so many groups that you have to bring along and it's hard to do it all in parallel. This, it's a little bit of an opportunity to just speak to the value of Medium and this idea of experts versus creators. They're typically, we're talking, if we go to the restructuring, normally we'd call that a recap is the shorthand for it. Typically that's done by bringing a new investor in and the new investor kind of is the forcing function. They say, if you want my money, we have to clean this all up. And that's usually enough to get it done. But we, in 2022, there was no new investor. There was like no market to invest in Medium. And so I didn't know what pressure point you could poke at until I talked to this VC, Mark Suster, who had blogged on Medium about how to do it. And he was like, I'd actually, rather than lead your recap, I'd rather you lead your own recap, then come to me. And the post was like, clean your own shit up first, basically. And I don't think very many founders need to read that post, but it was such an example of like lead with value,right? So, you know, now like, you know, what's Mark's business,right? His business is deal flow from other entrepreneurs and he could run Google ads, whatever, I don't know. Like, but for the most part, venture capital is a word of mouth business. So he put out this blog post that just saved, you know, saved my, you know, situation at Medium. And, and you know, it was posted to Medium, which I just think is so cool and so kind of meta. And it was basically the case for reminding you, and what he told me actually, he said the psychology of a CEO is you think you can work your way out of every, any problem. And so in order to get a recap done in this situation, you have to acknowledge that you can't work your way out of this problem and you have to threaten to quit. And I was like, oh, that's not really my MO. And, but I thought it through and I realized, yeah, actually there's no point in me coming to work tomorrow if there's a pretty significant risk that my partners are going to sabotage me. You know, my investor partners are going to sabotage me down the road. And so we started with that as the pressure point. And then we added in that we had this debt coming due and we needed, we needed to renegotiate with the debt. And we basically used those two things to push through a full financial restructuring, cram down the investors, which, you know, I like Silicon Valley investors because they understand they're not, they're not nickel and dime you. Like if you go to them and say your equity is currently worth nothing, will you play ball? They'll be like, yeah, great. Something is better than nothing. And also we don't want to get it be in the way, you know? And so, yeah, we got it done. The liquidation preference went away, the debt went away. We created more equity for the team. And it's almost like the Medium after that is just a Series A startup on top of a, you know, 10-year-old asset. **Ollie Forsyth** [27:27] Yeah. Kind of like this restart. **Tony Stubblebine** [27:30] Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [27:32] It seems, you seem very chill about it, but I can imagine actually like during that time, it was probably not the best time to be around Tony. I'd love to just get into the actual like mindset of you. ### Toughest Moments **Ollie Forsyth** [27:47] What was the most intense period for you? And who were the closest allies, friends, loved ones you had around you? **Tony Stubblebine** [27:59] I mean, I chose this job,right? Like this is not, I just, that's why I should be chill. Like what am I doing complaining about this job that I chose? And so I just, I think that maybe when I was a 28-year-old CEO, I would have been freaking out about everything. And now much more, thank you meditation, thank you journaling, thank you therapy, thank you exec coaching. Like you layer all those things in and it's a lot easier to just face reality and do your best with it. But the, I think the thing about a turnaround is that you're, it's a confidence game and you have to know going in that nobody has confidence in you because you're not the savior. You're the next mistake. Because the thing that got you the job as a turnaround CEO is all the mistakes that led up to it. So they don't see you as like, finally, we're going to stop making mistakes. They're just like, oh, this is the next, the next one looks like Tony, you know? And, and so the process is like get a clear, simple plan. And that clear, simple plan is like, look, we're losing money and we're not going to get more investment. So we need to close the gap or everyone's going to lose their job. It's not any more complicated than that. And then you need to tell them a more complicated plan about, and we want to save the company to do something important in the world. And then, and then you have to go on a listening tour and see which 20% of the company is ready to help you today. And it's, those are your allies. The book that I think a lot of people read is The First 90 Days. And it literally uses that language. Go find your allies, work through them,right? If I were to do it again, I think I would have been more aggressive about bringing in my own people, which it's actually like, I think that's like the stereotype of like, oh God, this new guy and his people who are loyal to him. But the thing is, like the thing that really gives people confidence is action and success. And if you're walking into a situation where there's already low trust and kind of a wait and see attitude, I would like, I would totally burn that trust to bring in more, more allies early so that you could move faster. I see now on the other side, like why new execs like to bring in their own lieutenants is because they don't have freaking time to convince everyone. Like I'm not, I don't have a reality distortion field,right? It's like I'm leading through logic and analysis. And so like I need proof points basically to bring people along. That's probably the one thing I would have done differently. **Ollie Forsyth** [30:57] You wrote such a beautiful post about this. It's called Fell in a hole, got out. We'll link it in the description. And for the audience listening, you should go and read it. And it just paints such a beautiful narrative on exactly what happened from start to finish, all the steps you took, the people, just I could feel it like the raw like motion. So we'll put it in the show notes and people listening should go and read it. So we're living in very different times now. And one of the things that I've been thinking about, you know, especially as we're entering this kind of like new media, the creator economy, which is kind of still a thing now is AI. ### AI Concerns **Ollie Forsyth** [31:42] Are AI models just going to eat away at content creators? Should we be concerned about them? **Tony Stubblebine** [31:53] I mean, it's a two-way street. I think that's, I do think we're at the end of the creator economy as we know it. And that something, people are going to come at it in a new way. But I think that what the LLM companies, the AI companies are just starting to realize is that they kind of created this prisoner's dilemma situation by coming out of the gate defecting on day one. Like they weren't like, hey, let's have an exchange of value. They were like, we're going to take all the value and give you none. What are you going to do about it? Right? And so now we're going to see like what are the content creators going to do about it? So it's like, I think my household is getting like a thousand dollars from Anthropic because we're benefit, we wrote books and we're beneficiaries of Anthropic having to pay for having trained on those books,right? And there's, we've been, we've been trying to jump into any standard possible to force AI companies to at least pay for the content and to respect the, like give content creators the ability to say how, like this is allowed and what's not allowed. Consent, you know, like there has to be some standards for consent. And we just moved from a period where OpenAI was really the big villain. Look, I mean, I don't like, I'm trying to pick a fight, but like I talk to writers every day and they're very unhappy with the situation where OpenAI was benefiting and they, and you know, they were not, not just weren't benefiting, but were like OpenAI like stole their content and then tried to replace them. And it just doesn't sit well with people. No surprise there,right? But now I think the ecosystem changed a lot where, you know, maybe two years ago we would have said OpenAI is the winner. No question,right? And now I think like our opinion is Google is going to win on search and Anthropic is going to win on enterprise. And that seems pretty clear and it's now backed up by pretty good execution. So now it's like, now I think eyeballs are turning to Google and they're saying like, and we're saying to Google, what are you going to do? Because this is not a good situation for us. So here's, I can break some, some actual like Medium data. One of the trends is that content is going to go private. And so I think we all like the public internet, but if it, if Google kills it, then we're going to go somewhere else. And I do think we're entering an era of more walled gardens. We just put a setting up for our writers about would they be willing to block an AI spider, even if it costs them page views? So like a lot of like AI scraping, it doesn't matter if you block it, like who cares? It just like you weren't never getting anything in return. But the way that Google, the Google scraper works is either you're like, either you say yes, you can train on my content or you don't get search traffic. And something like 4% of our authors, which is a lot, like given my understanding of how well authors sort of monitor their IP rights, 4% is a lot as a starting point. We're just like, nope, I don't want them anywhere near my content. And, and I just like, I'm like Medium even in this moment is, has built and is getting ready to launch private blogging groups where it just, if, you know, if we're not getting sort of bribed to write in public, let me just write to a smaller group, sort of like Discord for blogging. And, and so look, like in a lot of ways, the glass half full, those conversations are more valuable, more authentic. They're safer. People actually, I think it turns out would write more if they were in a safer place. And so I'm not like, at first I thought, oh, Google is screwing us,right? Like I was like worried for our own business. And now I'm more coming around to Google's just screwing themselves. And that's true for all of these AI companies is they do need ongoing access to the latest information. Like, yes, they have, their LLMs are strong enough now, but the LLMs are summarizing, like need to be able to summarize legit high-quality information. And if the public internet turns to slop and the high-quality internet goes private, then what is the value of their, you know, ChatGPT as a, you know, as a search replacement? There's no value to that. So it's an interesting trend and it is definitely, it's combative basically because Sam Altman set it up to be combative. And I think if they, if OpenAI had come out in a different way, could have been collaborative, but it's not. And so it's sort of like get your popcorn, like big companies are going to fight with each other and they're going to fight in the press, we're going to fight in our blogs and we're going to come onto your podcast and like tell you who I think the villains are. And that's just like, this is the backstory of this new media era that we're in. **Ollie Forsyth** [37:30] I agree with you. You know, I also used to follow those can they be ChatGPT with Win, now I'm with you, Anthropic and Gemini and Google to give the audience some more interesting perspectives. And super interesting what you're describing, you know, the high-quality content basically going private. I also agree with you and a lot of creators I'm speaking to are saying the same thing. But what's interesting is before four weeks ago, so we send a newsletter two to three times a week to 80,000 people. Literally, as soon as within the first 30 seconds of us sending that, we used to, we still get a couple hundred people, but now we get an additional two to three hundred AI summary open claws basically just summarizing this newsletter. And when I launched this community, new hypermedia.co, a lot of people were saying to me, isn't newsletters dead? If Open Claw is just going to summarize everyone's content, then newsletters, are they going to survive? And it goes back to the theme of today's chat is around, well, potentially, but I actually think we're entering this different era of type of content,right? Where is it timeless? So it's just a quick fact and it's just a quick piece of content, which is in today's world. Or, you know, is it that really strong, heavy premium content where it's timeless? **Tony Stubblebine** [39:03] Yeah. Dude, this, I've been making this case and I mostly based on my own observations of the usage around people is around me, which is we're actually in a writing renaissance where writing is more important because it's more useful. And this like, this idea that some people will read it as soon as you publish it. And now there's this whole other group of people that will read it either in summarized form or in, or it'll be brought back up to them because the LLMs are keeping track of these knowledge bases that you're creating and being like, oh, well, now's the time,right? So an example that I, that I've been using that's like close to home for me is there, there's an exec coach, teaches leadership at Stanford, Ed Batista. And he has like prolific blogger and newsletter writer at like thousands of posts. He put all of those posts into a ChatGPT, like custom ChatGPT, calls it Edbot. So now when I have like a difficult conversation, which like no surprise, I have a job that like puts me in a position where I have difficult conversations with people, I go prep that conversation in Edbot. And so it's like, yes, I've read many of Ed's individual posts, but now I'm like using that whole knowledge base of his in, or in like in an actual work context and it's resurfacing all these things. And you know, like usually I'll just take the summary, but almost always there'll be one thing in there that's like, oh, that's an interesting concept. Like I want to fully understand and I'll click through, I'll read the whole, the whole Ed post. And so I think this is why you're so interested in Evergreen is because you want to write something that's read on the day it's published, but you want it to be useful in these like AI agents that are going to have access to it for forever. Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [41:00] One of the things, you know, it'll be interesting to see what kind of happens over time is how do actually creators get compensated by these AI models? You know, if these AI models are making billions and billions and billions of dollars in revenue and they're scraping our content and we're utilizing our content, we don't even get cited. ### Creator Compensation **Ollie Forsyth** [41:17] How do creators, you know, benefit from all of this? So I just think we're in the early days. I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens. And yeah, there's two places **Tony Stubblebine** [41:29] where I've started to hear about per inference pricing. One is public, the RSL standard, which we helped support. I have like even a section of that standard I wrote. And they're trying to create almost like an ASCAP kind of situation where there's a standard way for everyone to get paid. And there's one other company that I'm aware of that an AI company that wants to go in that direction. I just, my worry is they're moving too slow. Like on, like this period in where we're not getting paid is a period where like we're all going to adjust. It's sort of like, you know, tariffs or something like in the US. Like we just saw this happen. It's like you, you introduce tariffs and then people immediately change their businesses. Like businesses will go out of business or business will change their business model. They'll change their supplier. And then if you take the tariffs away, they don't go change it back. You know, it's like they've already made the change that was required. And soright now in this period of non-compensation, we're like, we feel the impact and we're not getting compensated. Everyone's making those changes and we're not going to reverse those changes just because some mediocre per inference price comes through. And so just like every day this doesn't happen, I think is undercutting the future value of these AI companies. **Ollie Forsyth** [42:51] Yeah. I also think for the, for the creators, yes, I mean the creators I speak to and who are in kind of our network, a lot of them just don't understand where this whole thing is going because it's just moving so quickly. But I do think it's a great opportunity for creators, and I'd love to get your take for them now to really start thinking about how do I diversify my audience? How do I future proof my channels? If AI does start summarizing all of our content, should we be doing videos? Should we be launching new different types of formats? And ultimately, like how do we start diversifying our revenue streams? Is that something you're seeing and is that something creators should be doing? **Tony Stubblebine** [43:32] I've been in media for like, or adjacent to it for so long, like not just Medium. And like just go back to this, everything old is new,right? Like this has actually always been the case for a media person. I'm friends with the children's musician. I'm going to tell her a story, but you let people guess who it is. And she was explaining to me how she got started, you know, selling tapes basically to students of a kindergarten where she was a teacher,right? And then she was on Nickelodeon and then this and then touring. And now she's like, and now I've got my own Tonies. And I was like, what the heck is a Tony's? Like I don't, you know, I don't even know what this is, but there's these music boxes for kids that like you, you can buy essentially like a figurine that goes on top that represents an album. And so it's like when she was selling tapes out of the back of her trunk, she wasn't thinking, and then one day there'll be toy music boxes that I'm licensing my music to. It's like you don't, it just, the ecosystem changes so often. Or like there was a period in Web 2.0 where I saw like these rappers would start showing up at the Web 2.0 events and, and Chameleon Air was there. And I remember him saying, I'm the number one selling ringtone artist of all time. And I was like, what does that even mean? You know, and like here we are, like ringtones aren't a thing you sell anymore,right? Like I don't even know where I would like buy a ringtone. And so that, like that's an example of you, like you just always have to be reinventing yourself. And maybe your core of who you are stays, but it's not, it's normal that you would have a functioning media business and then you have to redo it for, for a new era. And this maybe is easier for independents than it is for, you know, a whole, you know, like a newspaper, for example. Like famously, many newspapers have struggled to reinvent themselves because it just might not be possible at that size. But an individual person can go to public speaking, they can go to consulting, they have like all of these different, different ways to adjust. They can move to TikTok and then move off of TikTok and, you know, and go to long form and then to short form. And so I just, I like, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, if you're a curious person, like you're, the creator life is a life of reinvention. **Ollie Forsyth** [46:12] That's it. I think that's a good take, you know, reinventing. One reinvention we haven't really seen much of at all is this whole creator economy space. We briefly mentioned it, you know, during, during our chat and, you know, we've been covering this space since '21. ### Creator Economy? **Ollie Forsyth** [46:28] And if you look back in the last five years, nothing's really changed. Where did we go wrong? And, you know, is, is the creative economy even a thing anymore? **Tony Stubblebine** [46:38] Yeah, I mean, I think it got, it got saturated and I think it got saturated because it, it almost got, you know, at some point you got to say like, what's the healthy pitch? You know, the healthy pitch of, hey, it's possible for you to go independent of your existing like me, like I love to see a reporter leave a mainstream publication and then go independent. And then you see they're like true selves,right? And they're unconstrained. They're finally reporting the way that like they always want it. That, I think that's healthy. But at some level, like the creator economy is an opportunity to like, it's almost like a get rich quick scheme. And I'm actually really aware of this for this weird reason, which is I used to, I had a really popular habit tracking app for a while called Lyft. This was a business that I had started in 2011. And the number four most tracked habit, like you could track whatever you wanted. The number four most tracked habit was work on a secret project. And it just like made me understand how many people are dying to leave their job and are daydreaming about being independent. And so when the creator economy hit, I was like, oh, this is going to be so appealing on the surface. It's like, oh, this is a way for me to get out of my toxic corporate job. But you know, it doesn't, once you get into the reality of it, it's how much of that does the market want? You know, people have subscription fatigue, which is a huge reason medium subscription works. Honestly, it's like one thing for all the content rather than multiple subscriptions. And also the lifestyle is not great,right? Like if you talk to a creator a year in, they, this phrase like content treadmill, that comes from interviewing creators. Like I don't, that's not, I'm not making that up. They will on their own say, it just feels like a treadmill. And if I get off of it, then my whole business falls apart. But I, it's hard to have, you know, fresh new content every day, especially that's like authentic and high quality and additive to the world. It's just, you know, like there's a lot of failure in the creator economy. And so I think we're kind of, we're cresting that hype cycle is what it looks like to me. And then at the same time, I think the AI era is not just not that people won't adjust to it, is that there's going to be new entrants. Like the AI era is going to allow a different category of person. Actually, like I'll just say like something that blew my mind last weekend is I started like, I've written a lot. I've written, I think my kind of, my personal corpus of notes and drafts is about 6,000 things. So like pretty, like there's a lot of content in there, but I had never really put together an AI system for organizing it. And I just started writing a book and I'm like, I'm too busy to write a book. I know what it takes to write a book, but I use these AI tools to take everything I'd written before and like work out the plan for the outline of a book and then work out the structure of it. And I was like, this is what programmers are saying they can do now. I was like, all of a sudden, as like a freaking hobby, like as like, you know, 15 minutes before breakfast, I could like be making progress on a book. And so like I would say I'm a new entrant. I was like a re-entrant to the creator economy because the AI tools like lowered the bar for some existing expertise that I had. I'm like claim expertise on there's something back in my history for this. And so like, what are you going to do if now suddenly you're like, you're giving business advice, but you never run a business,right? Like you're going to get all of these like weird busy experts like jumping in because it's, it's easier to be in the creator economy, but they have something that is not replaceable. So I, like I just expect more chaos and it's not just how do you adjust, but we're going to see brand new people in this new era for sure. **Ollie Forsyth** [51:09] I think the new really exciting one to watch is this kind of whole intersection of AI, the creative economy, the new media era. This is where it seems to be like massively exploding and such an interesting topic to watch and pay attention to. And hopefully Medium is going to continue to, you know, continue, continue, continue to grow and grow and we're going to see what happens. **Tony Stubblebine** [51:35] It's like, I couldn't be more excited. I, like there was a moment where this change made me scared. And I hope other people kind of can go through the same emotional journey where it's like, maybe you're scared for a minute, but then you start to see the opportunity in it. And I'm like, I'm so excited for what's coming. **Ollie Forsyth** [51:53] Exactly. Well, hey, look, we have covered so much. We've covered the whole creative economy, the new media, where AI is going, Medium story. But if you were to take Medium 12 months from now, I don't think we can say five years because everything just changes so freaking quickly in this era. ### Next 12 Months **Ollie Forsyth** [52:10] Where is Medium heading in the next 12 months? And what are you most excited about? **Tony Stubblebine** [52:15] We have the huge expansion coming up in terms of helping people write more. Essentially, what does Medium's take on the AI era? Like a really AI native experience. So we have an app, actually you could technically weasel your way inright now called TK, which is like a social AI driven writing app. And it's, it's giving me as a writer the like that tingly feeling of I have so much power and, and it's so much easier to write. And I'm like experiencing the joy of writing in a way that had gotten, I think, kind of hard on the public internet. So yeah, all the themes that we're talking about, about like, like what AI enables people to do and also this like move to private, like yeah, that's not hypothetical for me. Like we have private writing groups in the works. We have a new AI assisted editor that I use every day. And that's all coming to the public, you know, hopefully within weeks or months. **Ollie Forsyth** [53:21] Amazing. Well, we can't wait. Well, hey Tony, thank you so much for coming on the show with an awesome story and we can't wait to see where Medium goes next. **Tony Stubblebine** [53:30] Yeah, thank you. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.