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Wikipedia

Medium (website)

December 11, 2023

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.

Medium
Type of businessPrivately held company
Available inEnglish (specific publications can be in Spanish, French, and other languages)
Area servedWorldwide
OwnerA Medium Corporation
Founder(s)Evan Williams
ChairmanEvan Williams
CEOTony Stubblebine
IndustryInternet
Products
Services
Employees179 (June 2021)[1]
URLmedium.com
RegistrationRequired to publish and write articles, some articles not behind the paywall are free
LaunchedAugust 15, 2012; 11 years ago (2012-08-15)
Current statusActive
Native client(s) oniOS and Android

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. The change is to its mix of paid journalists working on its own publications, to be reduced, versus its support of independent writers, which will increase.[5]

History edit

2012–2016 edit

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]

Medium has brought in revenue through native advertising and sponsorship of some article series.[18] Medium gained several new publishers to host their content 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".[20] At that time, the company had raised $134 million in investment from venture capital firms and Williams himself.[19]

In 2016, Medium acquired the rich media embedding platform Embedly, a provider of content integration services for numerous websites, including Medium itself.[21] That same year there were 7.5 million posts published on the platform, and 60 million readers used medium.com.[19]

2017–present edit

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. Backchannel, which left Medium for Wired in June, said Medium was "no longer as focused on helping publications like ours profit."[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.[17]

In January 2021, Medium announced that it had acquired the social-based ebook company Glose.[24][25][26] 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.[27] In November 2021, Medium also acquired audio-based learning platform Knowable.[28]

Medium employees announced their intent to form a trade union with CODE-CWA in February 2021.[29] According to the Medium Workers Union, 70% of eligible employees have signed union cards, representing workers in editorial, engineering, design and product departments.[29] On February 11, they asked management for voluntary recognition of their union.[30] On March 1, the company announced that the Medium Workers Union had fallen one vote short of the number needed for union recognition.[5] During the leadup to the unionization campaign, Medium hired the union-busting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis and the CEO Evan Williams led small discussion groups in which he urged employees not to join the union.[31]

On July 12, 2022, the company announced that Ev Williams would be stepping down as CEO and transitioning to chairman of the board.[32] Tony Stubblebine, chief executive of Coach.me, took over as CEO of Medium on July 20, 2022.[33][34] On August 11, 2022, Stubblebine announced a layoff of 29 staff members.[35]

User information and features edit

Users edit

Medium does not publish official user stats on its website. According to US blogs, the platform had about 60 million monthly visitors in 2016.[36] In 2015, the total numbers of users was about 25 million.[36]

Platform edit

The platform software provides a full WYSIWYG user interface when editing online, with various options for formatting provided as the user edits over rich text format.

Once an entry is posted, it can be recommended and shared by other people, in a similar manner to Twitter.[8] Posts can be upvoted in a similar manner to Reddit, and content can be assigned a specific theme, in the same way as Tumblr.

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.[37]

Users can create a new account using a Facebook or Google account. Users may also sign up using an e-mail address, when they are signing up using the mobile app of Medium.com.[38]

Memberships edit

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.[39]

Partner Program edit

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.[38]

Tag system edit

Posts on Medium are sorted by topic rather than by writer, unlike most blogging platforms, including Williams' earlier Blogger.[40] 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.[41]

Publications edit

"Cuepoint" redirects here. For audio engineering term, see Cue (audio).

"Publications" on Medium are shared spaces with a homepage on Medium's website that carry articles and blog posts, like a newspaper or magazine.[42] The articles published or saved on it can be assigned editors, and can be saved as drafts.

  • Medium acquired science and technology website Matter in 2013.[43]
  • Cuepoint, Medium's music publication, is edited by Jonathan Shecter, a music industry entrepreneur and co-founder of The Source magazine.[44] It publishes essays on artists, trends, and releases, written by Medium community contributors, major record executives, and music journalists,[45] including Robert Christgau, who contributed his Expert Witness capsule review column.[46] Cuepoint was started in 2014.[47]
  • Medium also published a technology publication called Backchannel, edited by Steven Levy.[48] In 2016, Backchannel was purchased by Condé Nast.[49]

In 2016, Medium hired the founder of the publication Human Parts, which focused on personal stories.[50]

On February 23, 2016, it was announced that Medium had reached a deal to host the new Bill Simmons website, The Ringer.[51] In August 2017 it left Medium for Vox Media.[52]

In 2019, Medium acquired Bay Area website The Bold Italic.[53] 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).[54][55][56][57][58][59][60]

In 2020, Medium launched Momentum, whose subjects are anti-racism and civil rights.[61]

Board and corporate governance edit

Board members edit

As of June 2020, Medium's board members were:[62]

Former use of holacracy edit

Medium initially used holacracy as its structure of corporate governance.[64][65] 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.[66][a]

Reception edit

Reviewing the service at its launch in 2012, The Guardian enjoyed some of the collections that had been created, particularly a collection of nostalgic photographs created by Williams.[67] TechCrunch'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.[8]

Lawrence Lessig welcomed the platform's affordance of Creative Commons licensing for user content,[68] 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.[69][70]

However, in 2013 the service suffered criticism from writers, with some confused about exactly what it is expected to provide.[71]

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".[72]

Government censorship of Medium edit

Malaysia edit

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. 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.[73]

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.[74] 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 edit

As of June 2017, Medium has been blocked in Egypt along with more than 60 media websites in a crackdown by the Egyptian government.[75] The list of blocked sites also includes Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post's Arabic website and Mada Masr. Medium was made available again in late 2022 as of November 2022.

China edit

In April 2016, Medium was blocked in mainland China after information from the leaked Panama Papers was published on the site.[76]

Albania edit

The Albanian Audiovisual Media Authority blocked Medium in Albania from April 19 to 21, 2020.[77]

Vietnam edit

By the end of 2020, Medium was reported to have been blocked by some ISPs in Vietnam.[78]

Russia edit

Roskomnadzor blocked Medium website and all its subdomains in the Russian Federation on May 31, 2023.[79][80]

Software architecture edit

Medium's initial technology stack relied on a variety of AWS services including EC2, S3, and CloudFront. Originally, it was written in Node.js and the text editor that Medium users wrote blog posts with was based on TinyMCE.[81] As of 2017, the blogging platform's technology stack included AWS services, including EBS, RDS for Aurora, and Route 53; its image server was written in Go, and the main app servers were still written in Node.[82]

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ For difficulties in coordination between departments in the corporate structure, see Bort (2017).

References edit

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External links edit

  • Official website  

December 11, 2023
medium, website, medium, american, online, publishing, platform, developed, evan, williams, launched, august, 2012, owned, medium, corporation, platform, example, social, journalism, having, hybrid, collection, amateur, professional, people, publications, excl. 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 MediumType of businessPrivately held companyAvailable inEnglish specific publications can be in Spanish French and other languages Area servedWorldwideOwnerA Medium CorporationFounder s Evan WilliamsChairmanEvan WilliamsCEOTony StubblebineIndustryInternetProductsBlogOnline publicationServicesBlog publishing systemSocial networkPublisherEmployees179 June 2021 1 URLmedium wbr comRegistrationRequired to publish and write articles some articles not behind the paywall are freeLaunchedAugust 15 2012 11 years ago 2012 08 15 Current statusActiveNative client s oniOS and AndroidWilliams 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 The change is to its mix of paid journalists working on its own publications to be reduced versus its support of independent writers which will increase 5 Contents 1 History 1 1 2012 2016 1 2 2017 present 2 User information and features 2 1 Users 2 2 Platform 2 3 Memberships 2 4 Partner Program 2 5 Tag system 2 6 Publications 3 Board and corporate governance 3 1 Board members 3 2 Former use of holacracy 4 Reception 5 Government censorship of Medium 5 1 Malaysia 5 2 Egypt 5 3 China 5 4 Albania 5 5 Vietnam 5 6 Russia 6 Software architecture 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 External linksHistory edit2012 2016 edit 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 Medium has brought in revenue through native advertising and sponsorship of some article series 18 Medium gained several new publishers to host their content 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 20 At that time the company had raised 134 million in investment from venture capital firms and Williams himself 19 In 2016 Medium acquired the rich media embedding platform Embedly a provider of content integration services for numerous websites including Medium itself 21 That same year there were 7 5 million posts published on the platform and 60 million readers used medium com 19 2017 present edit 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 Conde Nast publication left Medium Backchannel which left Medium for Wired in June said Medium was no longer as focused on helping publications like ours profit 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 17 In January 2021 Medium announced that it had acquired the social based ebook company Glose 24 25 26 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 27 In November 2021 Medium also acquired audio based learning platform Knowable 28 Medium employees announced their intent to form a trade union with CODE CWA in February 2021 29 According to the Medium Workers Union 70 of eligible employees have signed union cards representing workers in editorial engineering design and product departments 29 On February 11 they asked management for voluntary recognition of their union 30 On March 1 the company announced that the Medium Workers Union had fallen one vote short of the number needed for union recognition 5 During the leadup to the unionization campaign Medium hired the union busting firm Kauff McGuire amp Margolis and the CEO Evan Williams led small discussion groups in which he urged employees not to join the union 31 On July 12 2022 the company announced that Ev Williams would be stepping down as CEO and transitioning to chairman of the board 32 Tony Stubblebine chief executive of Coach me took over as CEO of Medium on July 20 2022 33 34 On August 11 2022 Stubblebine announced a layoff of 29 staff members 35 User information and features editUsers edit Medium does not publish official user stats on its website According to US blogs the platform had about 60 million monthly visitors in 2016 36 In 2015 the total numbers of users was about 25 million 36 Platform edit The platform software provides a full WYSIWYG user interface when editing online with various options for formatting provided as the user edits over rich text format Once an entry is posted it can be recommended and shared by other people in a similar manner to Twitter 8 Posts can be upvoted in a similar manner to Reddit and content can be assigned a specific theme in the same way as Tumblr 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 37 Users can create a new account using a Facebook or Google account Users may also sign up using an e mail address when they are signing up using the mobile app of Medium com 38 Memberships edit 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 39 Partner Program edit 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 38 Tag system edit Posts on Medium are sorted by topic rather than by writer unlike most blogging platforms including Williams earlier Blogger 40 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 41 Publications edit Cuepoint redirects here For audio engineering term see Cue audio Publications on Medium are shared spaces with a homepage on Medium s website that carry articles and blog posts like a newspaper or magazine 42 The articles published or saved on it can be assigned editors and can be saved as drafts Medium acquired science and technology website Matter in 2013 43 Cuepoint Medium s music publication is edited by Jonathan Shecter a music industry entrepreneur and co founder of The Source magazine 44 It publishes essays on artists trends and releases written by Medium community contributors major record executives and music journalists 45 including Robert Christgau who contributed his Expert Witness capsule review column 46 Cuepoint was started in 2014 47 Medium also published a technology publication called Backchannel edited by Steven Levy 48 In 2016 Backchannel was purchased by Conde Nast 49 In 2016 Medium hired the founder of the publication Human Parts which focused on personal stories 50 On February 23 2016 it was announced that Medium had reached a deal to host the new Bill Simmons website The Ringer 51 In August 2017 it left Medium for Vox Media 52 In 2019 Medium acquired Bay Area website The Bold Italic 53 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 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 In 2020 Medium launched Momentum whose subjects are anti racism and civil rights 61 Board and corporate governance editBoard members edit As of June 2020 Medium s board members were 62 Evan Williams Biz Stone Josh Elman of Greylock Partners Ben Horowitz Colin Kaepernick 63 Former use of holacracy edit Medium initially used holacracy as its structure of corporate governance 64 65 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 66 a Reception editReviewing the service at its launch in 2012 The Guardian enjoyed some of the collections that had been created particularly a collection of nostalgic photographs created by Williams 67 TechCrunch 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 8 Lawrence Lessig welcomed the platform s affordance of Creative Commons licensing for user content 68 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 69 70 However in 2013 the service suffered criticism from writers with some confused about exactly what it is expected to provide 71 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 72 Government censorship of Medium editMalaysia edit 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 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 73 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 74 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 edit As of June 2017 Medium has been blocked in Egypt along with more than 60 media websites in a crackdown by the Egyptian government 75 The list of blocked sites also includes Al Jazeera The Huffington Post s Arabic website and Mada Masr Medium was made available again in late 2022 as of November 2022 China edit In April 2016 Medium was blocked in mainland China after information from the leaked Panama Papers was published on the site 76 Albania edit The Albanian Audiovisual Media Authority blocked Medium in Albania from April 19 to 21 2020 77 Vietnam edit By the end of 2020 Medium was reported to have been blocked by some ISPs in Vietnam 78 Russia edit Roskomnadzor blocked Medium website and all its subdomains in the Russian Federation on May 31 2023 79 80 Software architecture editMedium s initial technology stack relied on a variety of AWS services including EC2 S3 and CloudFront Originally it was written in Node js and the text editor that Medium users wrote blog posts with was based on TinyMCE 81 As of 2017 the blogging platform s technology stack included AWS services including EBS RDS for Aurora and Route 53 its image server was written in Go and the main app servers were still written in Node 82 See also editSubstackNotes edit For difficulties in coordination between departments in the corporate structure see Bort 2017 References edit Mascarenhas Natasha June 3 2021 Medium sees more employee exits after CEO publishes culture memo TechCrunch Retrieved September 22 2022 A Medium Corp Company Profile and News Bloomberg Markets Bloomberg Retrieved 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