Yeah, half of that TDS story is missing, though at least at some point it was public knowledge. Basically their site got sold by the owners of the domain. It isn't the first time. Big pubs sometimes want to do this, though it comes with the huge legal head-ache of who owns the content. The TLDR of it is: the author. Not Medium, not the pub. Only the author. And that's good. It's one of the reasons I am still here on Medium, because I have control over my content. The whole custom domain thing was TDS' own doing. Medium has crazy good SEO domain authority, much better than any other custom domain would have, and I think it's getting even better as my articles are indexed by Google sometimes in less than 10-15 minutes. The whole story has nothing to do with the popularity of data science or software engineering. That continues to be very strong. I write about software development, tech and LEGO and the software development articles I write, far outrank the popularity of my other two niches. I think the moral of the story is in fact that Medium wasn't created for building businesses on top, but for writers to write and good niche publications to curate content for readers. Just my 2c'. 🤷‍♂️