Medium: New Partner Program incentives focus on high-quality human writing. “Changes are coming in August to the way we pay writers for great stories and which countries we support. Here’s what’s happening, why, and what it means for you.” I wrote about my weird Medium spam experience in January 2021..
TechCrunch: Medium embraces Twitter alternative Mastodon with launch of its own community. “Online publishing platform Medium, originally created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announced today that it’s embracing the open source Mastodon platform by creating its own instance to support its authors and their publications.”
NiemanLab: Medium’s new CEO on the company’s journalism mistakes, bundle economics, and life after Ev Williams . “The fate of a blogging platform may have somewhat lower stakes than some of the subjects we usually discuss around here. But a key question at the intersection of tech and democracy is what sort of publishing models the internet will support. How many journalists and other writers will be able to make a living? How will their work find an audience? And will the platforms they operate on ever find long-term stability?”
Variety: Level, Website for Black Men Aged 30+, Goes Solo From Medium.com. “Level, the publication for Black men launched on Medium three years ago, has migrated to its own website… with Medium founder/CEO Ev Williams serving as the lead investor.”
TechCrunch: Medium revamps its Partner Program, launching new eligibility requirements and referral bonuses . “Amid a year of editorial pivots and employee exits, Medium announced today that it will make significant changes to its Medium Partner Program, which allows writers on the platform to monetize their content.”
The Verge: The Mess At Medium. “Medium entered the year with more than 700,000 paid subscriptions, putting it on track for more than $35 million in revenue, according to two people familiar with the matter. That’s a healthy sum for a media company. But it represents a weak outcome for Williams, who previously sold Blogger to Google and co-founded Twitter, which eventually went public and today has a market capitalization of more than $50 billion.”
Search Engine Roundtable: Medium Google Organic Traffic Takes A Beating. “It seems that Medium, the popular publishing platform, hasn’t been doing too well in Google over the past couple of months – especially since December. And it seems like it is getting worse. Some are saying the site has 40% declines in organic visibility from Google search.”
Lifehacker: How to Read Medium Articles for Free. “Medium, the blog platform/publisher that once wanted to revolutionize online media, has put its content behind a $5/month paywall. After a couple of free articles per month, you can’t read anything else without paying up. Unless you use Twitter.”
TorrentFreak: Spammers Abuse Medium.com to Spread ‘Pirate’ Scams. “Scammers are using the online publishing platform Medium to spread links to supposedly pirated movies and TV-shows. The issue plagues many platforms, but as one of the world’s most visited websites, Medium is an ideal tool to lure prospective pirates into signing up for dubious subscriptions.”
TechCrunch: Medium says it will compensate writers based on reading time, not claps. “Medium is announcing significant changes to its Partner Program, where subscribers pay for access to exclusive content, and the revenue gets split with writers. The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based ‘primarily’ on reading time, rather than claps.”
TechCrunch: Looks like Medium is testing a way to save articles across the web. “Medium seems to be building a tool to save and reformat online articles for future reading. That’s according to Jane Manchun Wong, a reliable source of scoops on unreleased features. Wong said she spotted this one by reverse engineering Medium’s Android app and monitoring network traffic.” That’s it, Jane Wong’s getting a tag on ResearchBuzz Firehose, and I should have done it ages ago.
Mashable: From Bezos to Warren: Medium is now the place where powerful people make big announcements. “Medium has reinvented itself many times over, but one facet of its identity seems to be sticking: it’s becoming the writing platform of choice for billionaires, billionaire politicians, and anti-billionaire politicians alike.”
TechCrunch: Medium lowers its paywall for Twitter users . “On Wednesday, Medium CEO and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams announced that Medium is tearing down its paywall for readers that visit the site through Twitter. In tweets, Williams elaborated a bit on the company’s thinking, explaining that the decision wouldn’t affect Medium members who rely on paid readerships, as paid readers would still be counted like they were before.”
New York Times: Why Jeff Bezos Went to Medium With His Message. “Medium, the online open platform and publisher, is one bloglike platform that has persisted and innovated in the social media era. With 90 million unique monthly visitors, it has maintained relevance as a destination for open letters, petitions and personal essays. But it scarcely sparks such frenetic reactions as it did Thursday night.”
Business Insider: $132 million later, Ev Williams says he is raising even more money for Medium. “Ev Williams, the Twitter cofounder who has so far raised $132 million in investment for his longform publishing platform Medium, says the company is still not profitable and he will be raising more money.”
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