Nearly half the venture blogs in our index are hosted on Medium, and almost none of them still publish. Here's what the data looks like and where everyone went.
We audited our own index last week, fetching all 836 feeds one by one to see which were alive. The result was worse than we expected, and the pattern was obvious once we sorted it.
396 of the 836 feeds are hosted on Medium. Twenty-two of them have published anything in the last 90 days.
Our first assumption was that we'd broken something. Medium is aggressive about rate limiting, so a fetcher that gets throttled looks exactly like a dead blog. We checked the six largest Medium feeds by hand. In every case, the newest post on the feed matched the newest post in our database exactly. Nothing was broken. Those blogs just stopped.
Lightspeed's last Medium post was in 2023. Equal Ventures' was December 2024. Across the dormant set, most of the final posts cluster between 2021 and 2023, which lines up with when Medium started putting member-only walls around posts and firms realised they were building an audience on rented land.
Three things happened after that. Some firms moved to their own domain, usually as part of a site rebuild. Some moved to Substack or Beehiiv, where the email list is the point and the archive is a side effect. And some quietly stopped writing, which is less a publishing decision than a staffing one.
If you subscribed to a firm's Medium feed in 2021, you are probably not getting their writing today, and nothing told you. There's no forwarding address in RSS. The feed just goes quiet, and quiet is indistinguishable from "they didn't publish this week".
We found Lightspeed's current blog this way. Their Medium feed has been dead for three years; the one on their own site published yesterday. Same firm, different address, no redirect.
Three things, in order of how annoying they were.
First, we now check every feed in the index against its live source, not just against our own ingestion log. A feed that returns 404 and a feed that returns 200 with nothing new are different problems and need different fixes.
Second, when a publisher has moved, we re-point the entry rather than deleting it. The archive stays, the new posts start flowing, and anyone following that source on our site doesn't notice anything except that it's alive again.
Third, we stopped treating "number of sources" as a metric worth bragging about. Eight hundred feeds of which a hundred and thirty publish is not an index of eight hundred things. We'd rather describe it honestly.
If you run a fund blog that moved and still shows up in our index at the old address, tell us where it went. It takes about a minute to fix on our end.
Topics: Venture Capital & Startups
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