Medium is an American online publishing platform founded by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012 as a collaboration between him and others. It is owned by a company called A Medium Corporation. In addition to being a blog host, the platform is an example of social journalism, including a hybrid collection of amateur and professional individuals and publications, as well as exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is often considered as such.
Former Blogger and Twitter co-founder Williams originally created Medium as a way to post articles and documents that were longer than Twitter's 140-character (now 280-character) limit length.
Medium stated in March 2021 that it will be changing its publishing strategy as well as its revenue model. Specifically, it will alter its mix of paid journalists working on its own publications, which will be proportionately decreased, in contrast to its support of freelance authors, which will be increased.
History
Evan Williams, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter founded Medium to encourage users to write articles that were longer than the 140-character restriction of the social media platform at the time. According to Williams, when the company first started in 2012, "there has been less effort in raising the quality of what is being produced." There was a vacancy for a "Storyteller" position on the platform by April 2013, and Williams claimed that the platform was taking up "98 percent" of his time at the time. "We are trying to make it as simple as possible for individuals who have meaningful things to say," Williams said in August when the site was still in its infancy. However, he remained hopeful about its future.
Medium has been focused on improving the number of time users spend reading the site (1.5 million hours in March 2015), rather than increasing the number of its audience, since its inception in 2011.
When asked about web traffic metrics in 2015, Williams said that "unique visitors" was "a very unpredictable and useless statistic for what we're attempting to accomplish." Approximately 60 million unique monthly readers visited Medium.com in May of 2017, according to the business.
In addition to maintaining an editorial department staffed by professional editors and writers, Medium also employed many others as contractors and acted as the publisher for some periodicals and publications. A National Magazine Award nomination for Matter, which was based out of Medium Headquarters in San Francisco, was received in 2015. Medium made significant cutbacks to its editorial budget in May 2015, resulting in layoffs at hundreds of sites that were housed on the platform. Some newspapers walked off the stage.
Paywalled content, which is exclusively available to subscribers, was launched by Medium in 2017.
Using a like button that each user may click several times, Medium started compensating writers depending on how much their readers showed their enthusiasm for their work in 2017.
It wasn't long before the compensation formula was changed to take into account not just the length of time readers spent reading but also the usage of the "like" button.
Through native advertising and the sponsorship of certain article series, Medium has been able to generate money.
Medium has attracted some new publishers that have chosen to post their material on the platform.
There was an unsuccessful effort to add advertising to the site, which resulted in Medium laying off 50 workers in January 2017 and shutting offices in New York and Washington, DC.
According to Williams, "we had begun scaling up our teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model," but that Medium's long-term goal was to develop a "new [business] model for writers and creators to be compensated, based on the value they're creating for people."
[19] Williams had personally invested $134 million in the business at the time, which had attracted the attention of venture capital companies and other investors. [18]
A subscription program, available for $5 per month, provides access to "well-researched explainers, incisive views, and valuable information with a longer shelf life." Authors are paid a fixed rate per piece, which was announced in March 2017.
[20] Following that, the sports and pop culture website The Ringer, as well as the technology blog Backchannel, both of which were owned by Condé Nast, departed Medium. Earlier this year, Backchannel said that it was leaving Medium for Wired because Medium was "no longer as focused on helping sites like ours prosper." [21] In October 2017, Williams reiterated that Medium did not intend to pursue banner advertising as a revenue stream and that the company was instead investigating micropayments, gratuities, and patronage as potential income streams.
Medium.com had 7.5 million posts published in 2016, and it had 60 million unique visitors in the same year.
A Medium Corporation purchased the rich media embedding platform Embedly in 2016, which is a supplier of content integration services for a variety of websites, including Medium itself.
In January 2021, Medium revealed that it has bought Gloss, a social-based ebook business that was founded in 2012.
Medium workers declared their intention to establish a trade union with CODE-CWA in February 2021, and the union was approved by the company.
[26] According to the Medium Workers Union, more than 70% of eligible employees have signed union cards, which represent personnel in editing, engineering, design, and product departments, among other areas. [26] They approached management on February 11 and requested that their union be recognized voluntarily. [27] On March 1, the business stated that the Medium Workers Union had received one vote less than the number of votes required to be recognized as a labor union. [5] During the period leading up to the unionization campaign, Medium hired the union-busting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis, and the company's CEO, Ev Williams, led small discussion groups in which he urged employees not to join the union. During the campaign, Medium hired the union-busting firm, Kauff McGuire & Margolis. [28]
Information and features for the user
Users
The medium does not disclose official user statistics on its website, which is a good thing. According to US bloggers, the site had about 60 million unique visitors per month in 2016. [34] The overall number of users reached about 25 million in 2015.
Platform
When editing online, the platform software offers a complete WYSIWYG user interface, with a variety of formatting choices available as the user edits in rich text format, according to the platform software.
Once a post is made, it may be recommended and shared by other users, similar to how Twitter operates.
[8] Tumblr-like features include the ability to upvote posts, which is comparable to Reddit, and the ability to tag material with a particular topic, which is similar to Reddit.
In August 2017, Medium changed its Recommend button with a "clap" function, which readers may use to express how much they liked the post by clicking it several times. In a recent announcement, Medium said that remuneration to writers would be weighted depending on the number of "claps" that they get.
Users may sign up for a new account by logging into their Facebook or Google accounts. When joining up via the Medium.com mobile app, users may additionally provide their e-mail address as part of their sign-up information.
Memberships
Medium charges a $5 monthly or $50 annual cost to become a member, and users may subscribe at any time. Members of Medium get access to "exclusive material, audio narrations of popular articles, and an enhanced bookmark area," according to the site's description.
Program for Business Partners
Medium's remuneration scheme for its authors is referred to as the Medium Partner Program. Writers in the Partner Program are compensated depending on how thoroughly Medium users engage with their content. Writers get more money as members read for a longer time. Every month, Medium pays a percentage of each user's membership money to the authors who have received the greatest attention from that member.
System of tagging
Distinguishing itself from other blogging sites, including Williams' previous Blogger, posts on Medium are arranged according to the subject rather than the author.
[38] The platform uses a system of "claps" (formerly "recommendations"), which is similar to Facebook's "likes," to upvote the best articles and stories. This system is referred to as the Tag system, and it divides the stories into different categories to allow the audiences to choose which ones they want to read. [a reference is required]
Publications
The term "Cuepoint" leads to this page. Cue is an audio engineering word that may be found here (audio).
Like a newspaper or magazine, "publications" on Medium are distributing hosts that house articles and blog entries, similar to how a newspaper or magazine works. Articles published or stored on it may be assigned to editors, and draughts of articles can be kept for future use.
In 2013, Medium purchased Matter, a website dedicated to science and technology.
Creator and editor of Cuepoint, Medium's music journal, is Jonathan Shecter, who is also the founder of The Source magazine and an entrepreneur in the music business. Among those who have contributed articles include members of the Medium community, big record executives, and music journalists[40], as well as Robert Christgau, who provided his Expert Witness capsule review column to the publication. [41] Cuepoint began operations in 2014.
A technical magazine named Backchannel, edited by Steven Levy, was also produced by Medium as part of its overall publishing strategy.
[43] Backchannel was acquired by Condé Nast in the summer of 2016.
Medium recruited the creator of the personal stories website Human Parts in 2016, which was based in New York City at the time.
On February 23, 2016, it was reported that Medium had secured an agreement to host the new Bill Simmons website, The Ringer, which will go live the following month.
[46] It moved from Medium to Vox Media in August of 2017.
The Bold Italic, a website based in the San Francisco Bay Area, was purchased by Medium in 2019.
[48] In addition, Medium launched seven new journals in 2019: GEN (politics, power, and culture), OneZero (tech and science), Marker (business), Elemental (health and wellness), Focus (productivity), Zora (women of color), and Level (level of sophistication) (men of color).
Momentum is a new initiative established by Medium in 2020 that focuses on anti-racism and civil rights issues
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