2012–2016[edit]

Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and former CEO, created Medium to encourage users to create posts longer than the then 140-character limit of Twitter. When it launched in 2012, Williams stated, “There’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced.”

By April 2013, Williams reported there were 30 full-time staff working on the platform, including a vacancy for a “Storyteller” role, and that it was taking “98 percent” of his time. By August, Williams reported that the site was still small, although he was still optimistic about it, saying “We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people who have thoughtful things to say”.

Medium has been focusing on optimizing the time visitors spend reading the site (1.5 million hours in March 2015), as opposed to maximizing the size of its audience. In 2015, Williams criticized the standard web traffic metric of unique visitors as “a highly volatile and meaningless number for what we’re trying to do”. According to the company, as of May 2017, Medium.com had 60 million unique monthly readers.

Medium maintained an editorial department staffed by professional editors and writers, had several others signed on as contractors and served as a publisher for several publications. Matter operated from Medium Headquarters in San Francisco and was nominated for a 2015 National Magazine Award. In May 2015, Medium made deep cuts to its editorial budget forcing layoffs at dozens of publications hosted on the platform. Several publications left the platform.

In 2017, Medium introduced paywalled content accessible only to subscribers In 2017, Medium began paying authors based on how much users expressed their appreciation for it through a like button which each user could activate multiple times.The formula for compensation was soon adapted to also include the amount of time readers spent reading, in addition to the use of the like button.

Medium has brought in revenue through native advertising and sponsorship of some article series. Medium gained several new publishers to host their content on the platform. There was an aborted attempt to introduce advertising to the site, leading to Medium cutting its staff by 50 employees in January 2017 and closing offices in New York and Washington, D.C. Williams explained that “we had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model”, but that, instead, Medium was aiming for a “new [business] model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people”. At that time, the company had raised $134 million in investment from venture capital firms and Williams himself.

In 2016, Medium acquired the rich media embedding platform Embedly, a provider of content integration services for numerous websites, including Medium itself. That same year there were 7.5 million posts published on the platform, and 60 million readers used medium.com.

2017–present[edit]

In March 2017, Medium announced a membership program for $5 per month, offering access to “well-researched explainers, insightful perspectives, and useful knowledge with a longer shelf life”, with authors being paid a flat amount per article. Subsequently, the sports and pop culture website The Ringer and the technology blog Backchannel, a Condé Nast publication, left Medium. Backchannel, which left Medium for Wired in June, said Medium was “no longer as focused on helping publications like ours profit.” In October 2017, Williams reaffirmed Medium was not planning to pursue banner advertising as part of their revenue model and was instead exploring micropayments, gratuities and patronage.

In January 2021, Medium announced that it had acquired the social-based ebook company Glose. In November 2021, Medium acquired browser-based graphic design tool Projector. Projector’s team joined Medium and Projector was shut down in 2022. Projector co-founder and CEO Trevor O’Brien became Medium’s chief product officer. In November 2021, Medium also acquired audio-based learning platform Knowable.

Medium employees announced their intent to form a trade union with CODE-CWA in February 2021. According to the Medium Workers Union, 70% of eligible employees have signed union cards, representing workers in editorial, engineering, design and product departments. On February 11, they asked management for voluntary recognition of their union. On March 1, the company announced that the Medium Workers Union had fallen one vote short of the number needed for union recognition. During the leadup to the unionization campaign, Medium hired the union-busting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis and the CEO Evan Williams led small discussion groups in which he urged employees not to join the union.

On July 12, 2022, the company announced that Ev Williams would be stepping down as CEO and transitioning to chairman of the board. Tony Stubblebine, chief executive of Coach.me, took over as CEO of Medium on July 20, 2022. On August 11, 2022, Stubblebine announced a layoff of 29 staff members.