Type of business Private Owner A Medium Corporation CEO Evan Williams | Area served Worldwide Founder(s) Evan Williams | |
Available in English (specific publications can be in Spanish, or French etc...) | ||
Medium is an online publishing platform developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, and launched in August 2012. It is legally owned by A Medium Corporation. The platform is an example of evolved 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.
Contents
Williams developed Medium as a way to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter's 140-character maximum. It eventually grew into a separate platform independent of Twitter's brand.
Medium also has its own publications, including the online music magazine Cuepoint, edited by Jonathan Shecter; NewCo Shift, led by entrepreneur, author, and journalist John Battelle; and the technology publication, Backchannel, edited by Steven Levy.
Background
Williams created Medium from the ground up, with the idea of encouraging users to create longer posts than the 140-character standard 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, though 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 as "a highly volatile and meaningless number for what we’re trying to do".
In 2016, Medium introduced advertising, and gained several publishers as customers to host their content on the platform.
In January 2017, Williams announced that Medium was cutting its staff by 50 employees (around one third, "mostly in sales, support, and other business functions"), and closing its offices in New York and Washington D.C. He 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 Medium was instead aiming for a "new [business] model 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 Willliams himself.
Platform
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. Posts can be upvoted in a similar manner to Reddit, and content can be assigned a specific theme, in the same way as Tumblr.
Users can create a new account using an email address or a Twitter, Facebook, or Google account.
Tag system
A specific difference from Williams' earlier service Blogger is that posts are sorted by topic rather than writer. The platform uses the system of recommendations, similar to "likes" on Facebook, to up vote 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 distributing hosts that carry articles and blog posts, like a newspaper or magazine. The articles published or saved on can be assigned editors, and can be saved as drafts.
Cuepoint, Medium's music publication, is edited by Jonathan Shecter, a music industry entrepreneur and co-founder of The Source magazine. It publishes essays on artists, trends, and releases, written by Medium community contributors, major record executives, and music journalists, including Robert Christgau, who contributed his "Expert Witness" capsule review column. Medium also publishes a technology publication called Backchannel, edited by Steven Levy.
On February 23, 2016, it was announced that Medium had reached a deal to host the new Bill Simmons website, "The Ringer".
Reception
Reviewing the service, The Guardian enjoyed some of the collections that had been created, particularly a collection of nostalgic photographs created by Williams. 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.
Lawrence Lessig welcomed the platform's affordance of Creative Commons licensing for user content, 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.
However, the service has suffered criticism from writers, with some confused about exactly what it is expected to provide.
Malaysia
In January 2016, Medium received a takedown notice from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission 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.
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, as of January 27, 2016, all content on Medium has been unavailable for Malaysian internet users.