What is Medium?

A tech company that platforms writers? Or a writing platform that features tech?

I recently read Medium CEO Joe Stubblebine’s post ‘State of Medium’ and while the breakdown of Medium’s progress was interesting and encouraging, I was also left a little confused. Less about Medium’s financial position or its goals, but more about what it actually is. I mean, Medium is obviously a website that hosts text posts and blogging — its identity is not confusing — I’m more curious about what it does. A few things made me curious.

In the State of Medium update, Stubblebine is understandably proud that Medium is finally turning a profit. This is practically unheard of for large internet companies. Huge corporations like Netflix, YouTube and Twitter have never turned a profit. For a paywalled website for writers to buck this trend is remarkable. Stubblebine is quick to point to the improvements they’ve made to the website which has, indeed, made navigating it better, writing for it and reading from it easier, and has cut down on the AI slurry and trolls that clog up other text based platforms. But Joe also pointed one of the key reasons profit arrived (there has been little practical growth within the platform that would warrant such a sudden change in fortunes, after all) is because overheads have been slashed. This is due to massive digital…