Tony Stubblebine

CEO at @Medium. Some people call me Coach Tony. Less active here than I was in 2006. Find me on Medium or Threads or Mastodon or Bluesky.

[dany @danywander]

a reminder that branding matters.

[Tony Stubblebine @tonystubblebine]

@VinnyLingham @Medium Just seeing this. Still no reply?

[Ollie Forsyth @ollieforsyth]

We're at the end of The Creator Economy as we know it.

AI slop is everywhere. Content is becoming either timely or timeless. Does timeless content eventually become private? What does that mean for media? And what role does the creator play in it?

We are entering a new era for creators: The New Media Economy.

Attention. Distribution. Power. Taste.

Creators are going direct.

They are gatekeeping their premium content.

They are using community and distribution as a moat.

This is not just happening to creators, it's also happening to many tech companies.

They are hiring new types of roles: Heads of New Media, Heads of Storytelling, Chief Narrative Officers, Chief Clipping Officers, and Heads of Media Attention.

To help us understand where this category is going (and to help us understand what NEW MEDIA actually is), I want to introduce you to someone.

Recently, I sat down with @medium CEO @tonystubblebine, who shared the moments that led us to where we are today, where we’re going next, and the magical journey of becoming a successful new media creator in today’s era. We also talked about:

1. AI is making writing more generic. Creators are taking their premium content private. What should creators be thinking about?

2. Will AI models compensate creators? If not, what does this mean for creators who decide to take their content private?

3. AI models need on-going access to the latest high quality information. If the public internet turns to slop, there is no value. What does this mean going forward?

4. @Medium's incredible journey: from losing $2.5M a month to becoming a titan of the new media economy. @tonystubblebine shares how he turned the struggling company around and where it is today.

The NEW MEDIA Economy is here. Full episode in the comments.

[Ollie Forsyth @ollieforsyth]

.@tonystubblebine CEO at @Medium has so many hot takes on new media. Watch the episode in full 👇

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

I'm telling most everyone I know that they should build a personal OpenClaw

[Tony Stubblebine @tonystubblebine]

@m_ceb @hridoyreh @tamimbuilds But the AEO is super high.

[Tony Stubblebine @tonystubblebine]

You know the anxiety you feel when you are committing a small crime, like you think you parked 13 feet away from a hydrant instead of the required 15 feet?

Man, these guys in the Epstein files have none that.

[Tony Stubblebine @tonystubblebine]

https://t.co/xpgTWqhVib

[Tony Stubblebine @tonystubblebine]

This is what we said inside @medium in order to give space for people to participate in tomorrow's National Strike.
#NationalShutdown

[Aaron Levie @levie]

We will soon get to a point, as AI model progress continues, that almost any time something doesn’t work with an AI agent in a reasonably sized task, you will be able to point to a lack of the right information that the agent had access to.

This is why context engineering is the future. Basically you’re reverse engineering what an insanely smart human, would need to perform a particular task.

The caveat is this super smart person is an expert at almost any type of field of work, but one day they’re a lawyer at a Fortune 500 and the next day they’re an engineer at a startup. And they forget what they did between each task. And they can only keep track of one medium-sized thing at a time. Super fun challenge.

This means they need a ton of context - but not too much to get confused - about what they’re doing and why. So the job then is to try and build the system or set of systems necessary to deliver that data to the model as efficiently and quickly as possible.

This is why so much time is just going to straight into search and retrieval systems, heuristics for ranking information, system prompts, ways of keeping track of the work that’s being done to save context window space, and so on. One cool thing, though, is that unlike a person, this agent can process vastly more data at once, so all of a sudden you can apply more compute to the problem than would otherwise be helpful with people.

An insanely fun time right now to be building agents.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The counter point is, remember all the website clone templates you could buy back in the day for a social network, online forum product, a CRM system, building a cloud, etc. Yet for some reason none of them made a dent in any market.

It just turns out something very big separates the teams that want to build a real company that constantly innovates, acquires customers, serves them, etc. vs. someone cloning something and trying to build a quick website.

AI doesn’t seem to change the fundamental calculus of the complexity of building a real enduring company, and customers seem to be able to assess which companies fall into which category at scale.

[HUMAN WA$TE @Dplanet]

Maybe tell him that what people label “socialism” is usually social democracy. That means market economies with stronger safety nets and labour standards, not state ownership of everything. Democratic socialism aims to replace capitalism; social democracy regulates it. U.S. debates often blur this, but they’re not the same.

Tell him growth vs redistribution is nuanced. Recent empirical work finds well-designed, targeted redistribution can support growth (eg. via human capital and demand stability). It’s not a binary of “free markets grow, redistribution kills growth.”

And finally, tell him democracies change policy slowly; institutions constrain bad ideas and help good ones stick. Let’s track outcomes for a year - unemployment, inflation, real wages, child poverty- then decide if things are “ruined.” In the meantime, don’t make kids carry adult political fears; reassure him that whatever happens, family and community routines remain stable.

[Josh SchneiderWeiler @schneiderweiler]

Love this idea from Medium CEO, @tonystubblebine, on why writing will survive the rise of AI (via Big Technology podcast)

[Tony Stubblebine @tonystubblebine]

@nntaleb There's a new (exciting?) group of tools for professional content creators to build and monetize audiences. They are a welcome minority on Medium, but our incentives are for everyone else--people who write less because they are living more.

[Tony Stubblebine @tonystubblebine]

@nntaleb I think (hope) many of the complaints in the comments are outdated. Prior Medium had been more aggressive about pay and reg walls. But now we are in line with the world--often a modal to help you collect email subscribers. But no more than that since you dont paywall.

[This Week in Startups @twistartups]

So maybe AI isn’t going to kill writing after all?!

On this exclusive TWiST clip, @Medium CEO @TonyStubblebine suggests that — just as Cliffs Notes didn’t replace the original books — AI isn’t going to destroy the written word forever.

Tony argues that there will always be smart people who demand the depth, context, complexity, and humanity that can only be provided by flesh and blood human writers.

Do you agree? Sound off in the replies!

[This Week in Startups @twistartups]

Is there real money to be made in licensing your content to AI? MAYBE!

On today’s all TWiST 500 episode, @Alex chats with three founders about Really Simple Licensing, why tech companies only see your life’s work as DATA, and also EV mini-trucks. (Hey, it’s a diverse group.)

FIRST UP, @Medium CEO @TonyStubblebine walks us through the basics of RSL, why AI companies aren’t offering publishers a good value, AND the inside scoop on why chatbots love the em dash so much.

THEN, @humannativeai founder Dr. James Smith delves even deeper into data licensing and why his company is pivoting away from their marketplace model.

FINALLY, Jason Marks of @TELOtrucks shows off his EV mini-truck, talks about the advantages of the mini-truck design, AND explains why they’re making their trucks in the US.

🎥 Watch the full episode here 👇