Are Ads Coming to Medium?
It’s on everyone’s mind, but will this ever happen?
Medium isn’t like most other large social media companies. It wasn’t started during the dot-com boom and is now some highly profitable, multi-trillion-dollar social media company. It was launched in 2012 and really didn’t see much success until several years later. Now, it’s one of the largest sites in the world by web traffic, but despite the entire point is to drive web traffic through articles, it’s still kind of small compared to most. Most of the traffic is external, but they don’t run ads so it’s all about Medium memberships.
Medium almost certainly isn’t profitable, and it’s unclear how bad the problem is because they don’t disclose any of this. However, they have raised over $163 million, most of which has either been burned through or went to acquisitions. While it doesn’t mean Medium is dying, if the money spicket decides to turn off, they can’t just stop paying their writers because then the platform just dies. This creates a pretty interesting issue:
Writers need to be paid, but they can’t drastically cut their pay without killing the platform. However, the current model likely needs way more scale to be profitable and seems like the ceiling isn’t very high. Facebook and other social media companies have been struggling with user retention recently…
