[vosper]

Offtopic, but why would a CEO make an important (for his company and customers) post like this on medium.com? Why isn't this hosted on blog.coinbase.com or something? I know that Medium is a popular platform these days, but I think it weakens the branding of any company or individual to be posting there.

[tvanantwerp]

I was actually interviewed for a radio program the other week that is targeted toward federal employees in the DC area. I was being asked questions about a post I wrote on Medium.

The first question was, what is Medium?

I had to explain that it was just this open-to-anybody blogging platform, and not a personal site of mine. Outside of the tech sphere, it's not so recognizable.

[wcchandler]

Seriously? As a user of their service I'm glad to see them offload an extraneous expense to someplace that's better equipped for the service provided.

After evaluating this situation further, I felt further comfort in knowing there's an added level of authenticity to the post. They could have signed it with a GPG key which would've been nice, but not only would their core site have needed to have been comprised but also their medium account in order to deliver this news. Should this have been a security incident I would have been comforted by these additional ID confirmations.

[detaro]

Even a custom domain on Medium would bring it clearly under their brand (e.g. if this submission didn't have many comments I wouldn't have clicked it, since the title and medium.com signals "low-effort article by someone trying to make some political point", not "company blog"), while from a technical perspective also giving them the option to move later to a different platform without breaking their URLs.

[vosper]

Most companies don't regard brand-building and SEO as an extraneous expense. I'm sure Coinbase has spent their share of money on promotion. I'm also sure they could host a blog, or have someone else do it for them (does Medium have a self-hosted or custom domain option?)

[jpindar]

They do have a blog at blog.coinbase.com

[free2rhyme214]

I don't think Medium weakens Coinbase's brand. Mishandling something like an IRS subpoena is a lot more fatal.

[vosper]

Of course mishandling the IRS would be worse, but I wasn't comparing the brand damage of the two actions (though you seem to contradict yourself by saying "doesn't weaken" and then "a lot more fatal"). I was making a general claim that hosting important information or communication about your company off-domain weakens the brand of the company. I could imagine a worst-case scenario where putting great content on Medium actually harms your SEO, and you end up with Medium outranking your business in search results that you would really want going to your domain.