Medium is an American
online publishing platform developed by
Evan Williams and launched in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation. The platform is an example of
social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a
blog host.
Williams, previously co-founder of
Blogger
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...
and
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
, initially developed Medium as a means to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter's 140-character (now 280-character) maximum.
In March 2021, Medium announced a change in its publishing strategy and business model. The change is to its mix of paid journalists working on its own publications – this will be proportionally reduced – versus its support of independent writers, which will increase.
History
2012 (launched) - 2016
Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and former CEO, created Medium to encourage users to create posts longer than the then 140-character limit of Twitter. When it launched in 2012, Williams stated, "There's been less progress toward raising the quality of what's produced."
By April 2013, Williams reported there were 30 full-time staff working on the platform,
including a vacancy for a "Storyteller" role,
and that it was taking "98 percent" of his time.
By August, Williams reported that the site was still small, although he was still optimistic about it, saying "We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people who have thoughtful things to say".
Medium has been focusing on optimizing the time visitors spend reading the site (1.5 million hours in March 2015), as opposed to maximizing the size of its audience.
In 2015, Williams criticized the standard web traffic metric of
unique visitors
Website popularity is commonly determined using the number of unique users, and the metric is often quoted to potential advertisers or investors. A website's number of unique users is usually measured over a standard period of time, typically a m ...
as "a highly volatile and meaningless number for what we're trying to do".
According to the company, as of May 2017, Medium.com had 60 million unique monthly readers.
Medium maintained an editorial department staffed by professional editors and writers, had several others signed on as contractors and served as a publisher for several publications.
Matter
In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic partic ...
operated from Medium Headquarters in San Francisco and was nominated for a 2015
National Magazine Award
The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Or ...
.
In May 2015, Medium made deep cuts to its editorial budget forcing layoffs at dozens of publications hosted on the platform.
Several publications left the platform.
In 2017, Medium introduced
paywall
A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of ...
ed content accessible only to subscribers. In 2017, Medium began paying authors based on how much users expressed their appreciation for it through a
like button
A like button, like option, or recommend button, is a feature in communication software such as social networking services, Internet forums, news websites and blogs where the user can express that they like, enjoy or support certain content. In ...
which each user could activate multiple times. The formula for compensation was soon adapted to also include the amount of time readers spent reading, in addition to the use of the like button.
Medium has brought in revenue through
native advertising
Native advertising, also called sponsored content, is a type of advertising that matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears. In many cases it functions like an advertorial, and manifests as a video, article or editorial. ...
and
sponsorship
Sponsoring something (or someone) is the act of supporting an event, activity, person, or organization financially or through the provision of products or services. The individual or group that provides the support, similar to a benefactor, is k ...
of some article series.
Medium gained several new publishers to host their content on the platform.
There was an aborted attempt to introduce advertising to the site, leading to Medium cutting its staff by 50 employees in January 2017 and closing offices in New York and Washington, D.C.
Williams explained that "we had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model", but that, instead, Medium was aiming for a "new
usinessmodel for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they're creating for people".
At that time, the company had raised $134 million in investment from venture capital firms and Williams himself.
In 2016, Medium acquired the rich media embedding platform Embedly, a provider of content integration services for numerous websites, including Medium itself.
That same year there were 7.5 million posts published on the platform, and 60 million readers used medium.com.
2017 - present
In March 2017, Medium announced a membership program for $5 per month, offering access to "well-researched explainers, insightful perspectives, and useful knowledge with a longer shelf life", with authors being paid a flat amount per article. Subsequently, the sports and pop culture website ''
The Ringer'' and the technology blog ''
Backchannel
Backchannel is the use of networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside the primary group activity or live spoken remarks. The term was coined from the linguistics term to describe listeners' behaviours during verbal c ...
'', a
Condé Nast
Condé Nast () is a global mass media company founded in 1909 by Condé Montrose Nast, and owned by Advance Publications. Its headquarters are located at One World Trade Center in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan.
The company's media ...
publication, left Medium. Backchannel, which left Medium for ''
Wired
''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fra ...
'' in June, said Medium was "no longer as focused on helping publications like ours profit."
In October 2017, Williams reaffirmed Medium was not planning to pursue
banner advertising
Digital display advertising is online graphic advertising through banners, text, images, video, and audio. The main purpose of digital display advertising is to post company ads on third-party websites. A display ad is usually interactive (i.e. ...
as part of their revenue model and was instead exploring
micropayments
A micropayment is a financial transaction involving a very small sum of money and usually one that occurs online. A number of micropayment systems were proposed and developed in the mid-to-late 1990s, all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. A s ...
,
gratuities and
patronage
Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows on another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings, popes, and the wealthy have provided to artists su ...
.
In January 2021, Medium announced that it had acquired the social-based ebook company Glose. In November 2021, Medium acquired browser-based graphic design tool Projector. Projector's team joined Medium and Projector was shut down in 2022. Projector co-founder and CEO Trevor O’Brien became Medium’s chief product officer. In November 2021, Medium also acquired audio-based learning platform Knowable.
Medium employees announced their intent to form a
trade union
A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and benefits ( ...
with
CODE-CWA
The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees or CODE-CWA is a project launched by the Communications Workers of America to unionize tech and video game workers in January 2020. It sprung out of conversations with Game Workers Unite (GWU) and empl ...
in February 2021.
According to the Medium Workers Union, 70% of eligible employees have
signed union cards, representing workers in editorial, engineering, design and product departments.
On February 11, they asked management for
voluntary recognition of their union. On March 1, the company announced that the Medium Workers Union had fallen one vote short of the number needed for union recognition.
[ During the leadup to the unionization campaign, Medium hired the union-busting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis and the CEO Ev Williams led small discussion groups in which he urged employees not to join the union.
On July 12, 2022, the company announced that Ev Williams would be stepping down as CEO and transitioning to chairman of the board.] Tony Stubblebine, chief executive of Coach.me, took over as CEO of Medium on July 20, 2022. On August 11, 2022, Stubblebine announced a layoff of 29 staff members.
User information and features
Users
Medium does not publish official user stats on its website. According to US blogs, the platform had about 60 million monthly visitors in 2016. In 2015, the total numbers of users was about 25 million.
Platform
The platform software provides a full WYSIWYG
In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...
user interface when editing online, with various options for formatting provided as the user edits over rich text format
)
As an example, the following RTF code
would be rendered as follows:
This is some bold text.
Character encoding
A standard RTF file can only consist of 7-bit ASCII characters, but can use escape sequences to encode other characters. Th ...
.
Once an entry is posted, it can be recommended and shared by other people, in a similar manner to Twitter. Posts can be upvoted in a similar manner to Reddit
Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...
, and content can be assigned a specific theme, in the same way as Tumblr
Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...
.
In August 2017, Medium replaced their Recommend button with a "clap" feature, which readers can click multiple times to signify how much they enjoyed the article. Medium announced that payment to authors will be weighted based on how many "claps" they receive.
Users can create a new account using a Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
or Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
account. Users may also sign up using an e-mail address, when they are signing up using the mobile app of Medium.com.
Memberships
Medium offers users subscriptions to become a member for a $5 monthly or $50 yearly fee. With a Medium membership, access to "exclusive content, audio narrations of popular stories, and an improved bookmark section" is enabled.
Partner Program
The Medium Partner Program is Medium's compensation program for its writers. Partner Program writers are paid based on how deeply Medium members read their work. As members read longer, writers earn more. Medium distributes a portion of each member's subscription fee to the writers they read most each month.
Tag system
Posts on Medium are sorted by topic rather than by writer, unlike most blogging platforms, including Williams' earlier Blogger
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...
. The platform uses a system of "claps" (formerly "recommendations"), similar to "likes" on Facebook, to upvote the best articles and stories, called the Tag system, and divides the stories into different categories to let the audiences choose.
Publications
"Publications" on Medium are shared spaces with a homepage on Medium's website that carry articles and blog posts, like a newspaper
A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background.
Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports a ...
or magazine
A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combinatio ...
. The articles published or saved on it can be assigned editors
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, or ...
, and can be saved as drafts.
* Medium acquired ''Matter'', a science and technology website in 2013.
* ''Cuepoint'', Medium's music publication, is edited by Jonathan Shecter, a music industry entrepreneur and co-founder of ''The Source
''The Source'' is an American hip hop and entertainment website, and a magazine that publishes annually or . It is the world's longest-running rap periodical, being founded as a newsletter in 1988 by Jonathan Shecter. David Mays was the ma ...
'' magazine. It publishes essays on artists, trends, and releases, written by Medium community contributors, major record executives, and music journalists, including Robert Christgau
Robert Thomas Christgau ( ; born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most well-known and influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and ...
, who contributed his ''Expert Witness'' capsule review
A capsule review or mini reviewThe Word, 1976, issue 12, page 1Google Books/ref> is a form of appraisal, usually associated with journalism, that offers a relatively short critique of a specified creative work (movie, music album, restaurant, pa ...
column. Cuepoint was started in 2014.
* Medium also published a technology publication called ''Backchannel'', edited by Steven Levy
Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for ''Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book ...
. In 2016, ''Backchannel'' was purchased by Condé Nast
Condé Nast () is a global mass media company founded in 1909 by Condé Montrose Nast, and owned by Advance Publications. Its headquarters are located at One World Trade Center in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan.
The company's media ...
.
In 2016, Medium hired the founder of the publication Human Parts, which focused on personal stories.
On February 23, 2016, it was announced that Medium had reached a deal to host the new Bill Simmons
William John Simmons III (born September 25, 1969) is an American sports analyst, author, podcaster, and former sports writer who is the founder and CEO of the sports and pop culture website '' The Ringer''. Simmons first gained attention with ...
website, '' The Ringer''. In August 2017 it left Medium for Vox Media
Vox Media, Inc. is an American mass media company based in Washington, D.C., and New York City. The company was established in November 2011 by Jim Bankoff and Trei Brundrett to encompass ''SB Nation'' (a sports blog network founded in 2005 by ...
.
In 2019, Medium acquired Bay Area website ''The Bold Italic''. Also in 2019, Medium launched seven new publications: GEN (politics, power, and culture), OneZero (tech and science), Marker (business), Elemental (health and wellness), Focus (productivity), Zora (women of color) and Level (men of color).
In 2020, Medium launched ''Momentum'', whose subjects are anti-racism and civil rights.
Board and corporate governance
Board members
As of June 2020, Medium's board members were:
* Evan Williams
* Biz Stone
Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone (born March 10, 1974) is an American entrepreneur who is a co-founder of Twitter, among other technology companies. Stone was the creative director at Xanga from 1999 to 2001. Stone co-founded Jelly, with Ben Finkel ...
* Josh Elman of Greylock Partners
Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in the consumer, enterprise software and infrastructure as wel ...
* Ben Horowitz
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz (born June 13, 1966) is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder along with Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He previously co ...
* Colin Kaepernick
Colin Rand Kaepernick ( ; born November 3, 1987) is an American civil rights activist and football quarterback who is a free agent. He played six seasons for the San Francisco 49ers in the National Football League (NFL). In 2016, he knelt dur ...
Former use of holacracy
Medium initially used holacracy
Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance
Governance is the process of interactions through the laws, social norm, norms, power (social and political), power or language of an organized society over a soc ...
as its structure of corporate governance
Corporate governance is defined, described or delineated in diverse ways, depending on the writer's purpose. Writers focused on a disciplinary interest or context (such as accounting, finance, law, or management) often adopt narrow definitions th ...
. In 2016, they moved away from holacracy because they reported difficulty coordinating large-scale projects, dissatisfaction with the required record-keeping, and poor public perception of holacracy.
Reception
Reviewing the service at its launch in 2012, ''The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' enjoyed some of the collections that had been created, particularly a collection of nostalgic photographs created by Williams. TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately ...
's Drew Olanoff suggested the platform might have taken its name from being a "medium"-sized platform in between Twitter and full-scale blogging platforms such as Blogger.
Lawrence Lessig
Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...
welcomed the platform's affordance of Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
licensing for user content, a feature demonstrated in a Medium project with ''The Public Domain Review
''The Public Domain Review'' is an online journal showcasing works which have entered the public domain. It was co-founded by Jonathan Gray and Adam Green. It was launched on January 1, 2011 to coincide with Public Domain Day.
The ''Review'' ai ...
''—an interactive online edition of ''Alice's Adventures In Wonderland'', annotated by a dozen Carroll scholars, allowing free remixes
A remix (or reorchestration) is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, video, poem, or photograph can all be remixes. The o ...
of the public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work
A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...
and Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
licensed text and art resources, with reader-supplied commentaries and artwork.
However, in 2013 the service suffered criticism from writers, with some confused about exactly what it is expected to provide.
A 2019 Nieman Lab
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University is the primary journalism institution at Harvard. It was founded in February 1938 as the result of a $1.4 million bequest by Agnes Wahl Nieman, the widow of Lucius W. Nieman, founder of ' ...
article chronicling Medium's first seven years described the site as having "undergone countless pivots", becoming "an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like".
Government censorship of Medium
Malaysia
In January 2016, Medium received a take-down notice from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (Abbreviation: MCMC; ms, Suruhanjaya Komunikasi dan Multimedia Malaysia) is a regulatory body whose key role is the regulation of the communications and multimedia industry based on the po ...
(MCMC) for one of the articles published by the Sarawak Report
''Sarawak Report'' is an opinion, commentary, and political activism blog focused on environmental and corruption issues in Malaysia. It has been largely self-published and operated from London since 2010 by Clare Rewcastle Brown. The blog h ...
. The ''Sarawak Report'' had been hosting its articles on Medium since July 2015, when its own website was blocked by the Malaysian government. It had reported allegations that money linked to a state investment fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), ended up in Prime Minister Najib Razak's bank accounts.
Medium's legal team responded to the commission with a request for a copy of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission's official statement that the post was untrue, for information on which parts of the article were found false, and for information on whether the dispute has been raised in court. The site declined to take the content down until directed to do so by an order from a court of competent jurisdiction. In response, on January 27, 2016, all content on Medium was made unavailable for Internet users in Malaysia.
The ban has been lifted as of 18 May 2018, with the MCMC stating the ban lift was because "there was no reason (to block the website)" as the 1MDB report has been made public by the government.
Egypt
As of June 2017, Medium has been blocked in Egypt along with more than 60 media websites in a crackdown by the Egyptian government. The list of blocked sites also includes Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera ( ar, الجزيرة, translit-std=DIN, translit=al-jazīrah, , "The Island") is a state-owned Arabic-language international radio and TV broadcaster of Qatar. It is based in Doha and operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera ...
, ''The Huffington Post
''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...
''s Arabic website and Mada Masr
''Mada Masr'' ( ar, مدى مصر) is an independent Egyptian online newspaper, founded in June 2013 by former journalists of the English-language newspaper ''Egypt Independent'' following the shutting down of its editorial operations in April 20 ...
. Medium was made available again in late 2022 as of November 2022.
China
In April 2016, Medium was blocked in mainland China after information from the leaked Panama Papers
The Panama Papers ( es, Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents (or 2.6 terabytes of data) that were published beginning on April 3, 2016. The papers detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 ...
was published on the site.
Albania
The Albanian Audiovisual Media Authority blocked Medium in Albania from April 19 to 21, 2020.
Vietnam
By the end of 2020, Medium was reported to have been blocked by some ISPs in Vietnam.
Software architecture
Medium's initial technology stack relied on a variety of AWS services including EC2, S3, and CloudFront. Originally, it was written in Node.js
Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code o ...
and the text editor that Medium users wrote blog posts with was based on TinyMCE
TinyMCE is an online rich-text editor released as open-source software under the MIT License. It has the ability to convert HTML text area fields or other HTML elements to editor instances. TinyMCE is designed to easily integrate with JavaScript l ...
. As of 2017, the blogging platform's technology stack included AWS services, including EBS EBS may refer to:
Broadcasting
* EBS TV (Ethiopia)
* Educational Broadband Service, US TV service
* Educational Broadcasting System, South Korea
** EBS 1, a South Korean television channel
* Emergency Broadcast System, former US Warning system
...
, RDS for Aurora, and Route 53; its image server was written in Go; and the main app servers were still written in Node.
See also
* Substack
Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. Founded in 2017, Substack ...
Notes
References
External links
* {{Official website
American companies established in 2012
Blog hosting services
Blog software
Internet properties established in 2012
Online publishing companies of the United States
Subscription services