Medium (website)
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 Screenshot as of June 2016.
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| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
| Available in | English (specific publications can be in Spanish, or French etc...) |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Owner | A Medium Corporation |
| Founder(s) | Evan Williams |
| CEO | Evan Williams |
| Industry | Internet |
| Products | |
| Services | |
| Website | medium |
| Alexa rank |
 333 (As of 21 November 2016[update]) |
| Registration | Free access to articles written by registered accounts, but required for publishing and writing articles |
| Launched | August 15, 2012 |
| Current status | Active |
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.
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.
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.
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