Medium

Medium is an online publishing platform that connects ideas and perspectives on topics that matter.

Medium's mission is to deepen readers'​ understanding of the world and to empower writers to share their best work and biggest ideas.

Medium was developed by Evan Williams, and launched in August 2012.  The company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and is owned by A Medium Corporation.

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". According to the company, as of May 2017, Medium.com had 60 million unique monthly readers.

Medium maintained an editorial department staffed by professional editors and writers, had several others signed on as contractors and served as a publisher for several publications. Matter operated from Medium Headquarters in San Francisco and was nominated for a 2015 National Magazine Award. In May 2015, Medium made deep cuts to its editorial budget forcing layoffs at dozens of publications hosted on the platform. Several publications left the platform.

Medium offers users subscriptions to become a member for a monthly or yearly fee of $5 or $50, respectively. With a Medium membership, access to "exclusive content, audio narrations of popular stories, and an improved bookmark section" is enabled.

Medium is backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, GV, & Greylock Partners among others. The company has acquired 4 organizations including MATTER & Embedly.

 

 

  • Year founded: 2011
  • Funding Info: $132M in 3 funding Rounds (Last funding type: Series C)- It has also acquired 4 other organisations to date.
  • Yearly Revenue: $10M-$15M (2017)
  • Employee Size: 501-1000
  • Business Valuation: $600M as of Feb 2017
  • City/Town: San Francisco
  • State: California
  • Country: United States
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