Wordpress powers about a third of the web and Automattic has a significantly higher valuation than Medium. Maybe Medium's cooler, but it's not more successful.
But they aren’t more successful through the blog platform, instead by providing website foundation most companies use to create company websites, e-commerce websites and, a few of them, blogs.
> But they aren’t more successful through the blog platform, instead by providing website foundation most companies use to create company websites, e-commerce websites and, a few of them, blogs.
The blog platform provided the very foundation for their success because once people found out how easy it was, relative to the competition[0], to stand up an online presence using WordPress, you could "convert" the blog into an e-commerce website or a CMS or anything you can think of that needs to spit out HTML/CSS/JS, via the use of free/paid WordPress plugins.
[0] WordPress' competition included a wide variety of product categories apart from Movable Type, which used to be the dominant open source blogging platform. From dedicated CMS products like Joomla or Drupal or Plone, to dedicated e-commerce products like OsCommerce.
WordPress fit nicely in the middle of these product categories due to its vibrant plugin community and focus on ease of use (at the cost of security), which is part of why it became popular.
Automattic isn't just wordpress. But even if wordpress is more successful, the fact that medium had any success at all, even though wordpress already existed proves that medium did something right.
