Medium’s Message
As Head of Content Labs at Medium, Evan Hansen is pushing the boundaries to develop new features and uses for the platform. He spoke at the What Is Journalism? conference at the University of Oregon about Medium’s journey and mission.
“Medium was conceived as a writing platform,” Hansen said, “but I was also interested in illustration. We serve many groups.”
Indeed, the beauty of Medium is that it’s a blank canvas. A sandbox. As the website’s “What is Medium?” page states:
Medium is a beautiful space for reading and writing — and little else. The words are central. They can be accompanied by images to help illustrate your point. But there are no gratuitous sidebars, plug-ins, or widgets. There is nothing to set up or customize.
By being a blank canvas, Medium in a way bucks a publishing maxim. Each post creator uses images and text to control how his or her post looks, so each story looks different and Medium’s visual appearance is fluid. Many traditional publishers use visual similitude to create the backbones of their brand, such as the familiar colorful rectangles bordering the covers of Time or National Geographic.
“At one time we built very constrained templates,” Hansen said. “It looked great and was a beautiful place to publish, but all the articles looked the same.”
Hansen said that the uncomplicated nature of the platform extends to the work-a-day culture.
“We’re always spinning up experiments to try to get things going,” he said. “We see interesting things that we try to help out.”
As Medium’s readership grows, it is becoming more of a digital two-way street. This kind of detailed information about readers is extremely valuable for any online entity, as it can then more-efficiently tailor content and advertising.
“It’s tough to measure how long people actually spend reading a particular article,” Hansen said. “We track mouse movement, and if they make it to the end, that counts as a ‘read,’ as opposed to a ‘click.’”
Medium’s goals also involve finding an ideal audience by helping audiences self-select their online journeys, the better to create strong connections.
“We can begin to see who is actually reading,” Hansen said. “We want smaller communities of engaged people, rather than huge viral communities that are not really engaged. I just like the idea of working really hard on problems to make things better, and I think Medium is one of those. That’s super exciting to me.”
