How does branded content work on Medium?

Some of you may have seen several recent examples of sponsored stories on Medium.

It’s true. We’ve been experimenting fairly extensively with branded content on the site — essentially, having a brand sponsor stories and conversations aligned around a theme or a subject. We like these revenue-producing partnerships both for their aesthetic and their effectiveness. At their best, they have the power to be high-quality content experiences: thought-provoking, innovative, meaningful, and ultimately helping drive Medium forward in unique and interesting ways.

We launched Gone, in partnership with Marriott, in December last year, and we’ve recently launched four different partnerships.

We wanted to lay out the guidelines we use while choosing our partners and projects, along with a few thoughts on process and disclosure.

• First, how do we define branded content? Is it editorial? Is it advertising? Truth be told, it’s a bit of both. To us, it’s great content that aligns with a brand’s values and messaging and serves as a broadcasting vehicle for the brand’s identity. It hopes to effectively communicate what a brand stands for and perhaps even positively influence the lens through which you view it.
• How do we choose our brand partners? At Medium, the starting point is always this: Is there potential for a partnership to be interesting to our community while authentically representing the brand? Our hope is to work with brands that feel aligned with Medium itself — brands that share our desire to spark interesting debates and surface smart ideas. The partnerships that get us most excited are the ones where the relationship feels natural from its inception.
• Who produces this content and where does it live? We’ve recently begun experimenting with the distribution of this content through our network of publications, such as Backchannel, Cuepoint, and The Cauldron. These publications have built up impressive followings and are homes for influential writing and thoughtful conversations. To ensure the separation of church and state, the editorial staff of these publications aren’t deeply involved with these partnerships. Instead, Medium’s Branded Content Studio ideates and produces this content.
• How does payment work? All contributors to these partnerships are remunerated at par with, or above, industry standards. We hope that this is only the beginning of initiatives that allow content creators to be fairly compensated for the work they create on the platform.
• Do brands get to edit the stories in these partnerships? We collaborate, at a high-level, on the direction of the program with our brand partners, and they have insight into who’s writing what. But they aren’t the authors or editors. If the byline belongs to an unaffiliated individual, you can rest assured that the writer has written the piece without interference from the brand.
  In other cases, a partnership will include pieces which are bylined by the brand itself, or individuals directly affiliated with a brand. In those cases, the brand has complete control over the content, and we work with them to create the best embodiment of their message.
• How do we disclose such initiatives? We aim for full transparency with these partnerships, and to that end, we disclose these partnerships with prominent logos both at the top and the bottom of the story. For now, we think the term “Presented by” clearly denotes the relationship between the sponsor and the story. We are also working on further disclosure on other parts of the site, such as on the homepages of the publication and in social media and our newsletters.

Like all the other parts of this company, we are a constantly evolving division of Medium. As our product and offering to advertisers changes, so will some of what we’ve laid out above. What won’t change, though, is our firm commitment to quality, transparency, and creativity. Questions? Email us at [email protected]

Note: All of the above only applies to brand partnership projects managed and executed by Medium. There are, of course, other sponsorships on the site that take place independently of us, and over which we have no control.