What Makes Medium So Special?

My Interpretations of Medium’s Business Model

Photo by Slidebean on Unsplash

After I used Medium for a while, I found out that Medium’s business model is very special and different from other social media like YouTube, X, Facebook, or TikTok. So I decide to write this story to analyze it step by step.

Medium does not earn by showing ads.

I would say this is the most fundamental setting of Medium, which makes Medium so special among other social media.

There is no ad from the Medium official team. Third-party advertising and sponsorships are neither allowed. Only First-party (from the writers themselves) promotion is allowed. It is this fundamental policy that allows us to have such a simple but elementarily ad-free webpage, which provides us with excellent writing and reading experiences.

Medium takes a subscription fee, but not like a traditional magazine or newspaper.

Usually, people pay for professional services or products. However, the content on Medium is not necessarily given by professionals, the quality of the content is not as guaranteed as in the traditional media.
This comes from a decision in March 2021 when Medium decided to increase its support of independent writers, versus paid journalists.

However, it does not mean Medium is very loose on quality control. For example, the citation of images is strictly required, although Medium does promote super strict citation policies as academia or traditional media does.

For the use of subscription fees, Medium creatively sets up the policy that writers earn from each other’s subscription fees, hopefully by writing better stories. I have to say that this way of stimulating readers’ competitiveness is very clever.

I have no idea whether Medium takes a portion of the subscription fees for its operations, or whether they rely entirely on venture capital. If you know this, I would be happy to read your comment.

Although writers earn from each other, which seems like a Squid Game, Medium does not intend to cultivate super popular accounts as few “survivors”.

• This is why Medium does not announce or promote writers with the most followers, instead, they promote some new writers (see below).
• This is why you can not always receive the newest stories from accounts you follow since Medium does not prioritize pushing them first.
• This is also related to the ad-free strategy mentioned at the beginning: often the platforms that earn from ads need super popular accounts to attract more views.

Instead, Medium is more story-oriented.

The platform hopes to receive good stories from independent/amateur writers and find the correct readers for them.

• This is why Medium set up the boosting program.
• This is why Medium will completely ban AI-generated stories from making a profit. Why would a story-oriented platform allow that?
• This is why every month the Medium Staff account publishes the statistics on most-highlighted passages, most-read stories, boosted stories by new writers, etc. Here is an example for March 2024:

It happened on Medium: March roundup

Medium’s strategy to be profitable: my speculations

Because of the absence of ads, Medium needs a sufficient number of paid users and does its best to let them stay on the platform.

Thank you for one million members

You know that there are mainly two types of people on the platform: readers and writers. For the readers, Medium sets up a paywall to “lure” them to become subscribers to unlock the content they like. For the writers, Medium sets up the rule that writers should first become subscribers to earn from writing stories.

Potential conflict between the interests of readers and writers

I find this very interesting:

Paid users need to find professional content that meets their needs, while amateur writers will definitely create a lot of mediocre content.

This conflict means that the standards of professional content will make it difficult for amateur writers to write, and the prevailing mediocre content will make readers leave the platform. Medium needs to find a balance between satisfying the paid readers’ needs and incentivizing amateur writers to write.

Medium’s strategies: an ongoing journey

Of course, the Medium team notices this conflict. These are their solutions:

Establish Publications + Encourage Engagement

• Establish publications to classify the content on the platform, and force the content to be more professional by having editors.
• Try to build up the community by emphasizing the engagement attributes, including claps, comments, highlights, etc. With those positive engagements, users are less likely to leave. These types of interactions are very rare for traditional magazines and newspapers.
• Medium tried to use the Membership Referral Program to build up a close relationship between readers and writers, but that did not work so well, so they changed it to the Friend Link system, which also increased their subscription income at the same time.
• I believe there will be many better rules in the future, we are on the same exciting journey …

Photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash

Thanks for reading! Here are some of my other stories about Medium:

Read This to Understand Your Medium Stats Page

Why Medium Does not and Will not Support Math Formulas

Why You Should Turn on the Light Mode in Your Medium App