Medium is an American online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation.[2] 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,[3] and is regularly regarded as a blog host.
Williams, previously co-founder of Blogger and Twitter,[4] 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, reducing its own publications and increasing support of independent writers.[5]
History
2012–2016
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."[6]
By April 2013, Williams reported there were 30 full-time staff working on the platform,[7] including a vacancy for a "Storyteller" role,[8] and that it was taking "98 percent" of his time.[7] 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".[9]
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.[10][11] In 2015, Williams criticized the standard web traffic metric of unique visitors as "a highly volatile and meaningless number for what we're trying to do".[11] According to the company, as of May 2017, Medium.com had 60 million unique monthly readers.[12]
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 operated from Medium Headquarters in San Francisco and was nominated for a 2015 National Magazine Award.[13] In May 2015, Medium made deep cuts to its editorial budget forcing layoffs at dozens of publications hosted on the platform.[14] Several publications left the platform.
In 2017, Medium introduced paywalled content accessible only to subscribers.[15] In 2017, Medium began paying authors based on how much users expressed their appreciation for it through a like button which each user could activate multiple times.[16] 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.[17]