So…The Ringer is on @Vox now. More specifically, they are on SBNation now. That’s cool. I also work for SBNation. But, my heart is with The Nosebleed Seat, it’s like my second pet besides Shea. Say hi, Shea.

Hi.

So…The Ringer is on Vox now. What does that mean for us here on Medium. Well, at first glance, it was like, “Sweet! We’ll move up the food chain in the millennial-male-sports demographic and get more pageviews! Instead of Ben Lindbergh and Shea Serrano getting the front-page Medium stories, those shits will be ours!!”. Keep in mind, this was like, an instant reaction.

So…The Ringer is on Vox now. Which after thinking about for more than 90 seconds, sucks pretty bad. After all, those sports fans came to Medium just to read The Ringer Staff, I mean, that’s how I initially found out how cool of a place this was. All of us lower-level sites were just sucking off the teet, inserting our stories in Ringer’s comment section and getting a few recommends from Medium’s algorithm. Not anymore, I suppose.

So…The Ringer is on Vox now. And a lot of other big sites have joined them — not on Vox necessarily, but on other publishing platforms. In fact, julian rogers wrote a killer piece about the whole situation, which I will link below. Check it out, it’s a real shame as to how many sites have bailed — hard.

So…The Ringer is on Vox now. And I can’t blame them. Quality content and media is expensive. Sites that, ya know, pay their writers, need to have some ad revenue coming in, and Medium Staff just doesn’t allow for it.

So…The Ringer is on Vox now. Which is good for them, and sort of good for us, but at the same time, also bad for us and the rest of this wildly-awesome-but-sort-of-dysfunctional platform. Medium must be angry, or scrambling, or sad. They’re losing their anchor store, like a shopping mall without a Sears or Macy’s — just a bunch of TCBY’s and Hollister’s. To give you an idea of the damage, I remember Bill Simmons saying once that his site brought in five-million unique visitors per month. In the pageview world, that is some serious cache.

#PrayForMedium