State of Medium
Medium Day keynote: A better internet and other announcements from Medium Day 2024.
Hi there, I’m Medium’s CEO.
Obviously you are here for me to talk about Medium, but I’m going to start by talking about Vermont.
The first time that I wrote about building a better internet, Ryan Rucker, who is both a Medium reader and Medium writer, wrote a response that started out by talking about Vermont.
For our global audience who might not already know this, Vermont is part of the United States and is often considered one of our gems. Ryan wrote to say why. He said:
The first time that I drove through Vermont, I felt at peace looking at the beauty.
Later I learned that Vermont had banned billboards so that people could better enjoy this beauty.
Medium reminds me of Vermont. Too many places are littered with ads which then make the experience more stressful than it is worth.
So then I come to Medium. I read articles from seriously talented writers and I feel refreshed, informed, and far more connected. ~ edited version of Ryan’s comment.
Thanks, Ryan.
Like Vermont, we have said no to ads because they are a distraction from what you’re here to do. We are building a better place on the internet that treats you the way Vermont treats you as opposed to say, the way a Las Vegas casino treats you. We want you to be part of this.
Instead of ads, we’ve chosen to be member supported and you, thankfully, have given a lot of that support. About half of the attendees today are members.
For the half of you that aren’t members yet, I’m not here to sell you. I’m just going to tell you what we are doing and how we are doing it. And if that seems like that’s something you want to be a part of, then today is a great day to become a member.
So let’s talk about why the rest of the internet doesn’t feel like Vermont. We know the internet is broken and getting worse. It’s flooded with ads, spam, misinformation, disinformation, division, anger, and hate.
The villain is ads. They make businesses care more about your attention than they do about serving you. It’s as simple as incentives: When a business is paid for by ads, you stop being their customer.
However, because we are member-supported, we get to build our space on the internet very differently. I’m going to go deep on three keys that are only possible because we are supported by members.
First, we are building a place that recommends great writing, not the loudest writers.
This is the most important thing we’re doing, so I’m going to spend the most time on this.
Medium is about connecting you to great writing.
On Medium, we’ve often found that the most interesting writers rarely have the time, or desire, to learn to play the attention-grabbing game. Medium is built differently so that we can find and share these writers with you. Great writing comes from writers who are busy living, not busy hustling.
Here are three examples of perspectives that shine on Medium.
First, a year ago, generative AI hit the news hard and the NYTimes was on it by publishing 12 names you absolutely needed to be paying attention to. The problem was that they only named men. This was such a bad miss that it even left out the chief technology officer of OpenAI. Soon after, Séphora Bemba, who isn’t a journalist but rather a professional in this field, published suggested corrections on Medium.
When the U.S. Supreme Court issued a recent ruling on immunity, partisan opinions popped up all over the internet. But in the I Taught the Law publication on Medium, Dan Canon, who is a Brandeis Professor of Law, put the news into legal context for everyone.
Fans of Andre 3000 had been waiting for years for him to release another rap album. Instead, and surprisingly, he released an instrumental flute album. On Medium, Joah Spearman wrote about hearing him perform it live, saying “Last night, I witnessed a performance that moved me to tears.”
Those three stories represent three examples of how all of us are filled with expertise. The first is expertise about your profession. The second is academic expertise earned through research and scholarship. The last is lived expertise.
By definition, all of us have expertise about what we have lived through. The magic of blogging is that you come to discover how often one person’s experiences, big or small, ends up being a big help to the people that read these experiences.
This is why we focus on the best writers, not the loudest ones: We want to help writers spend more time living and less time hustling the attention economy.
How do we help readers find these great stories?
There are more than 300 publications on Medium that accept submissions. Of course, they have standards. I’m pretty sure you have to have a law background to write for the I Taught the Law pub. And that’s the point. Each publication is a curator of a level of quality and a point of view.
A huge portion of what you read on Medium was published and edited by one of these community publications. But what you probably don’t know unless you are a writer or editor here is how much time some editors spend.
In May, we were lucky enough to have two editors come speak to Medium staff. This is Debra G. Harman, MEd. and Judy Walker from the Parasol Publications. They don’t work for us, they work for themselves and for their community of writers.
They were just awesome and as generous with us as they are with Medium writers.
We asked them what their editing process is and it’s so extensive that I felt like I needed a second talk just to summarize it. There’s the acceptance step, the editing and formatting step, the discussion amongst the editors step, and then, the working a piece up so that it is boost-worthy step. These steps all involve different editors in their publication and a direct human touch between editor and author.
I give this example because a lot of supposedly human interactions on the internet are actually pretty transactional. Retweeting someone is not the same as knowing them.
Medium is far from that transactional world. If you are part of this community, you’re going to meet real people, get real feedback, have real conversations. Many of you will end up meeting in person.
The second way we’re building a better internet is by respecting your time, free from ads.
A huge swath of the internet is supported by ads. But I don’t think you can build anything healthy if that’s your business model.
With ads, publishers get paid for your attention, rather than the value they provide. That is why the rest of the internet has so much clickbait, doom-bait, rage-bait, all the baits — they all grab your attention just long enough to show you an ad. But do they make your life better? No.
In 2017, Medium decided that we’d be member-supported rather than ad-supported. So, we don’t show ads at all.
As a result, Medium lets you focus on the story. That’s the obvious benefit. No distractions.
The even bigger benefit is what it means to be member-supported and know it. We learned the hard way that there is a big difference between what a member will click on and what they will be happy to have paid to read.
Our business only works if we hit a very high bar, which is that you read things that you are happy to have paid to read.
The third way we’re building a better internet is that we protect you from spam, fraud, trolls, and AI-generated content.
These are the bad actors of the internet.
Last year, Medium removed one million spam posts from your feeds every month. Last month, we removed nearly ten million. That increase represents a deluge of digitally-assembled nonsense that is hitting every part of the internet.
We’re able to do this because of our engineers, because of our trust and safety and curation teams, and because publications are great curators. They pick the treasures so that you don’t see the trash.
It does another important thing, which is that it makes Medium feel like a place where you can have a discussion, rather than a place where you are bound to have an argument.
The more we do to hold back bad actors, the more space we create for free speech.
So that combination of things — the way we focus on humans as writers, readers, editors; the fact that we’re member-supported rather than ad-supported; and the attention we pay to fighting bad actors — all of that is why Medium feels like a better internet. We’re working hard to keep it beautiful.
All right, let’s talk about updates. I have nine to talk about.
Medium is profitable.
August is our first profitable month in the history of the company. We got here because more members are supporting us than ever before.
In April, we celebrated one million members. There’s a side story about how good engineering has saved us money on our server bills. But mostly it was as simple as making something members wanted to subscribe to.
This milestone is one thing that should be important to everyone here.
It’s that a better internet is possible. It’s not a fantasy. What we’re doing at Medium works.
[Note: After I gave this talk at Medium Day, Richard Boekweg from our engineering team gave a great talk about the second biggest factor in our path to profitability: cost savings. Below is the star slide about how smart engineering cut our AWS cloud bill in half.]
Friends of Medium.
Last fall, we released a higher priced membership tier that offered the ability to pay more money to the authors you read. It is literally just an opportunity to be generous.
9,661 people are currently paying to be Friends of Medium.
All of this money goes to writers. Even as we cut other costs to make Medium profitable, we paid the writers more.
There is no better indication of the health of this community than the number of people who pay more just to be generous.
New icon and logo.
Over the years, we’ve changed our logos several times, first starting with a typographic approach and then moving to an ellipsis four years ago.
The ellipsis approach was meant to convey that there is always more to the story and thus that there is always more for writers like you to contribute.
However, the typographic approach drew us back because it conveyed the timelessness of writing. I connect this to our business success. Medium is a stable and hopefully timeless company, and so is your writing.
The new icon and standalone wordmark are live on our apps and on our website. They don’t use any new elements. The icon uses the existing typography of our wordmark to combine both concepts. It brings back a timeless typographic approach while using a gestalt technique for letting your mind fill in the rest to convey that there will always be more stories to tell.
This is not a rebrand; it’s a reaffirmation of Medium’s strengths. It uses concepts that we have believed in for a long time. Branding changes are often symbolic, and the symbolism here is that Medium has a strong foundation.
The Boost program.
The Boost is our primary program to curate the best stories for each reader. To date, we’ve boosted 42,000 stories and those stories have gotten 179 million views.
When I came on board as CEO two years ago, people were telling me Medium was cluttered with get-rich-quick scams and cheap listicles. That’s not true anymore, and now we’re hitting record membership levels. The Boost is the reason.
Verified book authors.
More than 9,000 writers have signed up for our verified book author program.
This is double from last year. This program helps book authors get the word out about their books and it helps readers understand more about the credibility of what they’re reading on Medium.
New countries.
We expanded the Partner Program to support payments to 77 more countries.
Understanding the world requires hearing from global ideas and experiences. Our Partner Program expansion now means that writers in 77 additional countries can now get paid for their writing. The total number of supported countries is now up to 119.
Global diversity is just one of the ways that diversity is a virtue at Medium. I always keep in mind a simple fact. You can only learn something from someone who is different than you.
One thing in the works.
Part of elevating publications on Medium is to constantly increase their ability to curate the best of what they see.
A thing that’s coming is that every single publication on Medium will have more power to boost stories to their own audience. That’s all I can say about that today.
Mastodon.
Last year I said that Twitter was dead. Well, it hasn’t died, even if it is dead to me. But I don’t feel healthy there.
What has happened is that there has been a large exodus to a number of places. We think writers who write on Medium often discuss what they’re writing in short form. Our interest is to help support that.
One way is with our Mastodon instance which gives you a hot at-me-dot-dm Mastodon username. (Mine is coachtony@me.dm.)
I think the fragmentation creates interesting options for people. I find the people on Mastodon to be the deepest thinkers and the most real. But I find Threads to be the best for self-promotion and sometimes, yes, I do have to play that game.
The Medium Newsletter
This is my last update, but it’s my first read of the day.
Earlier this year, we launched a deeply thoughtful and curious newsletter. We did this for one purpose, which is to showcase how the writing on Medium completes and complements the topics of the day. I don’t feel like I truly understand a topic until I’ve read about it on Medium. (Sign up for the newsletter here.)
If a friend or family member doesn’t understand what makes Medium great, send them this newsletter as a showcase.
And, I hesitate to say this to this many people, but we actively encourage people to submit tips for stories to feature, including your own. The Medium Newsletter is one of the largest on the internet, which means that getting featured puts your story in front of more than a million readers. If you have a tip, send it to tips@medium.com.
One more thing before I open this up to Q&A. That one more thing is to thank a small handful of people.
Thank you to the Medium team who is running this event. This is a ton of work and you do it with class. Likewise, thank you to the entire Medium team who has made this success possible.
Thank you to the 119 speakers who have volunteered their time today. Each is also a Medium writer.
Thank you for the more than 16,000 people who have signed up to attend for at least part of today.
But mostly, thank you for the one million members who make Medium possible.
I took this job two years ago knowing that we were going to have to make hard changes. But the hard changes are in the past now, so let’s go reap the rewards together.
