What is the “new” Medium?

Hannah Towey
4 min readApr 24, 2020

In 2012, two Twitter founders launched the “blog publishing platform” Medium. Curiously enough, most articles that cover the brand each attempt, and fail, to nail down exactly what it is that Medium does. Answers here ranged from “the Youtube for text” (Neiman Labs), “a place where worthwhile articles are sometimes available” (Time Magazine) to “a chaotically, arrhythmically produced by a combination of top-notch editors, paid writers, PR flacks, startup bros, and hacks” (The Atlantic).

The main question competing media companies are trying to answer is whether Medium is friend or foe to the traditional digital publishing model, and more importantly, to writers themselves.

This ambiguity in Medium’s utility and purpose actually proved to be the company’s main strength during its formative years. By sourcing content from unpaid writers with a desire to “be seen,” they had less financial restrictions than other digital publications. Combined with their subscription-only business model, the lack of advertisements and subsequently clean-cut website design was able to attract readers and writers alike. Finally, the lack of official ownership over article content led to minimal ethical or editorial obligations.

Soon, however, Medium’s lack of brand identity began to threaten any money-making potential the platform had accumulated thus far. Marco Arment, a writer and programmer prophesized: “[Medium] will also face a problem I’m familiar with: If the plan is to grow frontpage traffic and be more like a magazine, what kind of magazine is Medium? What’s it about? Who’s it for? And if they narrow the focus enough to make that easier to answer, who gets left out?”

Last February, Medium attempted to simultaneously answer and avoid this question entirely. By re-introducing vertical “magazines” with content organized thematically, the platform could potentially define their brand without losing their wide breadth of content. The key to this transition, as it had failed once before, was a new “sustainable, subscription-based business model” that made millions in revenue after Medium stopped selling advertisements back in 2017.

Access to new verticals will be included in a regular Medium subscription, which costs $5 per month or $50 per year, unlocking unlimited access to content. The company cites they have 120 million readers but does not pinpoint how many of them are actually subscribers. Most notably, it’s raised $132 million in venture funding, and it is not yet profitable.

Another key difference in the new model is that the magazine would include a mix of original content, written by staff writers and on commission, and content from Medium’s normal platform. The company’s investment in original content has increased by 168 percent since 2017, funding “partner program writers,” professional writers, commissioned columnists, and work syndicated from other platforms. According to Medium’s website, 8 percent of its partner program participants earned over $100 from the program, with top-earning stories earning thousands of dollars. Some writers with stories featured on the homepage earned upwards of $500 per piece for that month.

In July 2018, Medium tested how readers would consume and engage with thematic content by sending monthly “magazines” covering a range of topics. This helped the editorial board collect data on what themes their readers were most interested in — ultimately leading to the creation of today’s GEN (Politics and Culture), OneZero (Science and Tech), Heated (Food), Zora (Women of color) and Tenderly (Environmentally conscious living/vegans).

The remainder of this post will dive into the specifics of GEN, branded as: “What matters now. A Medium publication about politics, power, and culture” with the browser domain https://gen.medium.com/. The homepage is a mix of current-event related articles such as “The End of the Era of Impartial Justice,” and “America is gonna save the Democratic Establishment by…” with more lighthearted cultural takes like “This Man Makes Millions Selling Dogs to the Government.” If you scroll down to the bottom of the homepage, you’ll see “The Hater’s Guide to the Candidates,” a series of political roasts (one roast per article) for each presidential wanna-be.

You can tell there’s an effort to be timely, which we can assume is organized by the editorial board — there’s not quite enough incentive for unpaid bloggers to break any news/commentary first. However, it is not revealed which authors are paid writers for Medium and which posts have been crowd-sourced from Medium’s partner-writers. The result is a some-what falsified impression of community and originality. Dominated by strong, often negative opinion pieces with a sprinkle of feel-good features, the spread of content appear to represent a consumer desire for subjective pieces over objective news.

Beyond content, the most striking thing about the site is the lack of ads and simple user-friendly interface with bold colors and intriguing article titles. The design matches that of Medium, and the Medium brand and logo are visible throughout the Gen site. What strikes me as particularly novel overall is that their branding conveys a sense of genuine thought, democratic content, community, anti-clickbait and anti-ad. Whether that is true, or just a successful feat of marketing, may determine whether the “new” Medium will finally turn a profit.

--

--