What Is Medium And Why Should Startups Care?

5 min readDec 12, 2017

First, it was Facebook. Then, it was Twitter. Then Instagram. Vine. Snapchat. Reddit. Anchor. Insert 180 other social products here. Somewhere in the mix, Medium was brought to life. This one was a little different from the get-go.

For starters, the founders, Ev Williams and Biz Stone, also were the cofounders of Twitter. Before that, Ev founded Blogger, which was eventually acquired by Google. It’s safe to say that the people behind this platform know their stuff. Additionally, they have amassed over 100 million dollars in funding and have 60+ million monthly active readers.

So, Medium. What is it? According to them, it is…

“a place where everyone has a story to share and the best ones are delivered right to you.” — Medium About Page

So let’s be real. As a startup founder, this means pretty much nothing to you. Great, it’s a storytelling service. Why the heck does this matter to startups out there? Let’s dive a little deeper here.

Sure, on the surface, Medium looks just like a long-form version of Twitter, but when you peel back the layers a bit, you see why 60 million people come back to read something interesting on Medium every month. In this post, I’m going to tell you what Medium is in detail, what opportunity it presents, how brands have been utilizing it already, and you can utilize it yourself.

Let’s get started!

What is Medium?

My definition is a little different from theirs. I’d say, Medium is a collection of thoughts, organized in a way that matches what a reader is looking for at any given time. Breaking this down to its core, Medium has four important elements to it:

Profiles
Tags
Claps
Publications

Profiles

A profile is simply a user. All users have the ability to publish stories on Medium. These posts can be anything. They could be something intellectual, a rant, a poem they thought of, or anything else. Every user has a profile, and whenever they write anything on Medium, it is listed under their profile. So, I could write a post right now, publish it, and you could search my name on Medium and find that post.

Get Mat Sherman’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

If Medium was only comprised of profiles, with no tags or search fields, it would be a lot like Twitter. It would have a mix of quality content, garbage content, and everything in between. They bypass this quality control problem in a few ways. One of them is tags.

Claps

If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you’ll see an applause button on the bottom left. If you click that (or hold it), a lot happens under the hood. First, Medium see’s the activity, and makes a note that one person found this article useful. The more claps an article gets, the more valuable Medium thinks it is. So, Medium staff might feature this post on the home page, send it out in a tweet, or put it in an email blast. On Medium, the best content rises to the top, no matter who the writer is.

So far we have a few interesting elements. We have users who write stories. These stories are then hosted on our profile and can be shown to anyone else on Medium in their search results. A way to help users find topics that they are interested in is searching individual tags. A way to help with quality control is to assume that posts with 100+ claps is a high-quality story. Things are coming together. What’s missing? Publications, the backbone of Medium.

What is a Publication?

Think of your favorite newspaper or online news source. Let’s use Wired for example. Let’s look at their homepage.

Clearly, you have the Wired logo on top, you have a few different topics broken out into tabs like Business, Culture, and Science. Then you have your feature articles on the home page. Behind all this content is a team of editors and a team of writers working under the editors. Sound like a familiar model? Good. Now let me introduce you to the Medium Publication.

Here’s another one to give a second example.

A Medium publication is almost the exact same as a publication like TechCrunch, Wired, or People. The only difference is that it’s simply hosted on Medium. Note, you are able to link up your domain to your publication so it doesn’t even look associated with Medium.

Users submit their stories to be featured in publications. Some publications have hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of page views a day. The 60 million strong community of Medium prowls the site for content that bends their minds. Many of them get accustomed to reading content from a publication. For example, developers read Hacker Noon or freeCodeCamp, while founders read Startup Grind or Signal v. Noise.

Speaking of Signal V. Noise, that isn’t just any publication. That is the official publication of the company, Basecamp. This multi-billion dollar company hosts their company blog solely on Medium. Read about why they did it here.

Turns out, they aren’t the only brands hosting publications on Medium. Airbnb, Dropbox, The White House(Pre 2017), Facebook, and others use Medium to share their thoughts through their publication.

What Does This Mean For You?

If these big dogs are hosting their blogs on Medium, should you too? We say yes. We’ll write another blog post about this but Medium is in a similar position as Youtube was in 2005…It is quickly growing, yet somewhat undiscovered. The upside of posting on Medium, or at least cross-posting your current blogs onto Medium, is very high. The downside is minimal.

We’ll be writing many blog posts on how you can use Medium for your brand. This is only the beginning. From ins and outs of Medium to theory on what you should post on here, to inside tips, we’ll share it all. Our goal is to educate. Let us know how we can do that better. Until next time, see you on Medium.\

Did you get value out of this post? Ready to take on the world and dive into Medium? Awesome! Hold that clap button for as long as you’d like, and feel free to subscribe to the blog below. And as always, thank you for reading! ❤