How does Medium make money?- Medium Businesss Model

how does Medium make money 2000

Medium is one of the top-ranking online publishing platforms that allow both expert writers and amateur to publish their contents just as easily as you could think of it. The organization acts as the underlying place like an intermediary between the readers and the publishers and provides them with tools to easily create their write-ups. This is a nice way for you to be heard and an easy place to start your career as a writer. Say you are new to writing and publishing; Medium allows you to help you get in front of readers across the globe easily. Let’s see ‘How does Medium make money?’

The business model adopted by Medium is based on charging its customers a subscription fee. This subscription fee is either paid monthly or yearly, based on your personal preference. The amount paid by the customers is $5 per month or $50 per year. Parts of the revenue generated from the subscription are then shared with the content writers who are actively publishing on the platform daily. As a business founded in 2012, the former co-founder of Twitter and bloggers, the Medium has risen to the top and become one of the most go-to places for sharing and reading writes from individuals to organization’s bodies.  The company has raised more than $132 million throughout its creation while continuously amassing a valuation rate of over $600 million. 

How does the medium platform work? 

Medium is considered an online platform where everyone can come to write and share their ideas and perception about anything to the world. Everyone now has the power to share their content with the world and get noticed by having a page on Medium. As the business founder wrote on his Medium page, he said: “Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say.” Meanwhile, the type of content posted on the medium pages varies from Business articles, Health-related post-politics, Engineering, to name a few. 

Aside from contributors, Medium has grown to a stage where it partners with other large publication houses and groups, which help distribute contents of various topics on their platform. Examples of renowned publishing houses and groups that leverage on Medium include but are not limited to Hacker Noon, Twitch. tv blog, The Economist, Bloomberg, and many more. 

As you know, technology is one of the major help humans rely on in the 21st century; Medium uses a mix of artificial intelligence and human editor knowledge to pick show contents that would be rated over other users’ content.  More so, the selection of content topics is controlled by AI technology.  Furthermore, with the help of the technological improvements made on the platform, users can now follow and bookmark articles of interest, topics that catch their attention, and publications that they would love to refer to some other time. 

To easily assist the content creators in getting their content across to the readers, the medium site is structured simply with minimal design effects while featuring many white color selections and removing any distractions that might shift your attention away from the main piece you are reading audience. As the publisher, the platform has been designed in a simple way where everything is designed to help simplify the content creation process and enable you to publish your piece with little effort in play. As a content creator, all you need to do is register for an account on the platform and get started with your publishing activities. The published content is then reviewed and vetted properly to ensure enough quality in the piece you intend to put up for the reader on the platform. 

A Brief Overview of the Medium Business

The Medium was established in 2012 by the former co-founder of Twitter, Evans Williams, who also doubles as the organization’s CEO. He was born in 1972 and grew up on a farm located 90 minutes away from Lincoln, Nebraska. He then proceeded to study at the infamous University of Nebraska; however, he couldn’t finish his studies but later dropped out of the University. After borrowing money from his parents, he decided to start various tech organizations when the internet came into the limelight in the early 1990s. His business was centered on selling CDs that contained information about his University football teams and did several video tutorials for people to connect to the internet. 

However, many of the businesses he has ventured into did not turn out as he had expected, while at the age of 24, he moved to California to build his network with other big tech businesses in the world. Luckily he got hired by O’Reilly, and his major job duties were to help the organization sell programming manuals for software that this organization has created. A couple of years down the line, he made his first home run and was getting bigger. 

By 1999, he and Meg Hourihan founded a software tool designed to help project managers who are professionals execute their jobs without hassle. The organization he and Meg Hourihan ran was named Pyra labs. However, the company could not finish with the project management software; however, they build Blogger. For people who aren’t familiar with bloggers, this was a platform used for publishing purposes; it could be referred to as a mini-website that allows anyone to create and distribute their preferred content on the World Wide Web so easily. 

Unfortunately for Him and Hourihan, the popular .com came into existence which somewhat crippled the Blogger before it could get so big. Although the company was expensive to govern and scale at that time, the organization was going bankrupt in a short moment. Subsequently, Williams was able to get by the day by laying his hands on some small contract and kept releasing updates for his blogger product day in day out. Finally, two years down the line, his work has paid off, and he was able to release a premium base version of his blogger platform, which would cost you subscription-based to use.

However, in 2003, the Pyra Labs business was acquired by Google; although the amount was not disclosed to the media, it was believed to have been a huge sum of money. For about half a year, he stayed at Google before moving on in 2004 by September to co-found Odeo, a podcasting organization. The organization’s main focus was to help redistribute audio content, which was similar to what Blogger did. However, the bandwidth issues were one of the underlying problems faced by Williams, and iPhone capacity was unable to support the brilliant idea of William. 

By the early part of 2006, some of the employees at Odeo had begun experimenting with the software created that year which was used to create short text and distribute over the whole contact list via the SMS platform.  The little gimmick software was launched in 2006 by July and became Twitter three months down the line. As a result, the Odeo user base grew and was rebranded to Twitter which exists to date.

While Twitter has grown up so big and was preparing to launch its initial public offer in 2013, which made Williams a billionaire, Williams had already had another idea in the pipeline, which would be his next venture. By the tail end of 2012, the new venture was Medium. The development of Medium came from Williams’ habit of creating platforms that deal with content creation and publishing, which can be considered as social media in the present age. Therefore, more focus was shifted to making content published on Medium become more engaging and shareable as much as possible. This idea ultimately leads to the destruction of blogging as people can now read quality articles on Medium, as proposed by William.

Medium, which was only available to people through inviting, became a publicly accessible platform in October 2013. After the unveiling of the platform, Medium had to take down many posts made by individuals due to the use of inappropriate languages, misrepresentation, and harassment. Despite the backlash and the troubles of Medium, it was able to raise to the tune of $25 million from Google, Michael Ovitz, and many others.  

Around the same time, Medium began experimenting with other sources of income when it ran a series of sponsored posts for the BMW motors. The new partnership came when the platform allowed custom posts to be made through publication preferred domains such as Awl. 

The growth of Medium 

Over the years, the medium platform has kept the growth of the platform discrete. Meanwhile, the company continued to publish that it is focused on getting users to spend more time on the content they consume on their platform. Although it came as shocking news when the company announced that about a third of their staff were laid off while closing down offices in Washington Dc and New York. As a result of this drastic measure taken by the organization, many partnership companies terminated their contract with Medium; however, Medium continued to pursue a new methodology of generating income based on subscription services. With this method, the selected content is only made available to subscribers who are on the platform.

How does Medium make its money?

The business model used by Medium to make money is based on customer’s subscription monthly or years which are either $5 monthly or $50 yearly. Users who are subscribers gain access to premium stories, exclusive publications. Aside from the subscription base plan, other premium features are included in the business model concept of the business to help generate revenue for the organization. This include: 

  • Access to the monthly magazine released by medium e themed collection and exclusive columnist
  • Popular stories in audio version
  • Selected publications from leading publishers and magazine content creators on the platform.

When an audience reads the story on Medium, a portion of the user membership subscription fees goes to the author of the content. The Medium Company claims that some writers make over $25,000 by publishing content on their medium page. 

The subscription aspect of the business began in 2017, which is something observed in journalism as a way to get royalties for your content.  Many other businesses that do the same thing use a similar business model to generate their revenue; after years, they have struggled to lower the ad volume displayed on their platform. The likes of Bloomberg, The New Your Times, and others have set themselves on this pedestal to earn income for news and content made available on their platform. 

Medium Valuation and Revenue

Based on the Crunchbase report, Medium is believed to have raised about $132 million in the rounds of the venture capital funding, which has taken up to three rounds. The Medium was able to announce a valuation totaling $600 million after the third valuation round was announced in April 2016. The business has many investors such as Greylock Partners (led by LinkedIn & PayPal co-founder Reid Hoffman, Google Ventures, and many more. Others. More so, since Medium is a privately held organization, it has no obligation or rules compelling it to declare its revenue annually. 

Conclusion

The business model adopted by Medium is designed to help readers get access to vetted and high-end quality content that matches their interests. It also shows that users can easily enjoy perks on their subscription fees and enjoy the services they have paid for. Meanwhile, contributors on the platform are paid based on the number of readers that visit their content while they get from the share of what is paid as subscription fees by the subscribers who use the platform actively.

FAQs

Is medium profitable?

In 2016, about 7.5 million posts were made on the medium platform, with an audience of 60 million engaging with the platform daily. In 2016, the Medium Company went ahead and acquired the rich media platform known as Embedely and formed integrated services that comprise the Medium itself. As if the year 2019 medium was not profitable.

How much money does a medium make?

You can make a good income from the Medium in your first three months of publication, but the pay can be so little that it is insignificant to you as an income. However, as soon as you settle in, you can make about $25 in a month on your medium account after about 100 days.

How does Medium make money?- Medium Businesss Model

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