Medium is an American online publishing platform for written content such as articles and blogs, developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012.
In March 2021, Medium announced a change in its publishing strategy and business model, reducing its own publications and increasing support of independent writers.
"[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.
[9] Medium aims to optimize 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".
[12] Medium maintained an editorial department staffed by full-time editors and writers, had several others signed on as contractors, and served as a publisher for several publications.
[13] In May 2015, Medium made deep cuts to its editorial budget forcing layoffs at dozens of publications hosted on the platform.
[19] 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.[20][19] 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 [business] model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they're creating for people".
[19] 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.
[22] Subsequently, the sports and pop culture website The Ringer and the technology blog Backchannel, a Condé Nast publication, left Medium.
"[23] In October 2017, Williams reaffirmed Medium was not planning to pursue banner advertising as part of their revenue model and was instead exploring micropayments, gratuities and patronage.
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.
With a Medium membership, access to "exclusive content, audio narrations of popular stories, and an improved bookmark section" is enabled.
[40] Posts on Medium are sorted by topic rather than by writer, unlike most blogging platforms, including Williams' earlier Blogger.
[8] Lawrence Lessig welcomed the platform's affordance of Creative Commons licensing for user content,[69] a feature demonstrated in a Medium project with The Public Domain Review—an interactive online edition of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, annotated by a dozen Carroll scholars, allowing free remixes of the public domain and Creative Commons licensed text and art resources, with reader-supplied commentaries and artwork.
[72] A 2019 Nieman Lab 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".
[73] In January 2016, Medium received a take-down notice from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) for one of the articles published by the Sarawak Report.
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.