Medium (company)

Medium is an online publishing platform where people can publish their articles for free. It’s used by both amateur and professional writers. As of August 2019, most of the articles are hidden behind a paywall, which forces visitors to pay for an account. In this way authors usually reach a smaller audience but make a larger profit. Medium CEO Ev Williams is co-founder of Twitter.

Medium attracts 90 million unique visitors a month and 20,000 articles per day are generated by users, based on 2019 data. The company aims to incentivize quality writing over clickbait, endeavoring to publish the world’s best test-based content.

In 2017 Medium launched a $5 per month, or $50 per year metered paywall where members would get syndicated content from established publications like The New York Times, New York magazine, and The Financial Times. Mediums staff would choose certain stories rather than run every article. The company also works with professional freelance writers and journalists. Medium hired Siobhan O’Conner, former executive editor at Time. O’Conner has hired editors across a number of beats and they commission longform articles, regular columns and a full-length book has been commissioned.

Members of the Medium community have the option of placing their piece behind the Medium paywall where the amount given depends on the amount of engagement the article received. Engagement involves the number of “claps” and users that read to the end of the article. Evaluators hired by Medium have the job of finding the best articles generated by the community. An evaluator my work with the writer to improve their piece. The article will be placed into topic “channels” and onto the Medium homepage and daily newsletters. In 2018 Medium claimed it had paid out $5 million to writers. The highest payout for a single story was $4290 in January 2019.