Medium's attempt to build a Netflix-style destination for premium writing required raising over $157 million while running monthly losses that reached $2.6 million at their peak, according to the Pirate Wires account of the company's subscription push and its aftermath.
medium was burning $2.6M a month when its union replaced the phrase "free and open" from the company's rules with "a safe, respectful, and welcoming environment." then came substack. the untold story of what should have been the next great publishing giant from @HarrisSockel https://www.piratewires.com/p/what-happened-to-medium
The reporting links the shift toward stricter content rules and the paid-membership model to the exit of many prominent creators and a drop in market share, alongside an unsuccessful unionization effort.
No independent financial filings or additional public records corroborate the precise monthly loss amount, and details such as current revenue scale or runway stay outside the available evidence.
Many users blamed Medium's unsustainable spending, editorial biases, and shift from open policies for losing writers after its $157 million raise and failed Netflix-style model, while a few praised its early contributions.
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medium was burning $2.6M a month when they replaced the phrase "free and open" from the company's rules with "a safe, respectful, and welcoming environment." then came substack. the untold story of what should have been the next great publishing giant from @HarrisSockel
Publishing platform Medium raised over $157 million, at one point burning over $2.6 million per month, in an effort to become something like the “Netflix of publishing” — the default destination for the best writing on the internet, all for $5/month.
That is, until it lost many of its best writers and market share...
@HarrisSockel recounts the rise and fall of one of the most influential platforms of the last decade, featuring new details on a failed union drive, the platform’s censorial speech policies, erotica on Joe Biden’s homepage (yes), and the battle of the business models that reshaped the internet.
Full story 👇
@micsolana @HarrisSockel Generational missed opportunity to title this piece “When Medium Became Small”
medium was burning $2.6M a month when they replaced the phrase "free and open" from the company's rules with "a safe, respectful, and welcoming environment." then came substack. the untold story of what should have been the next great publishing giant from @HarrisSockel
Publishing platform Medium raised over $157 million, at one point burning over $2.6 million per month, in an effort to become something like the “Netflix of publishing” — the default destination for the best writing on the internet, all for $5/month.
That is, until it lost many of its best writers and market share...
@HarrisSockel recounts the rise and fall of one of the most influential platforms of the last decade, featuring new details on a failed union drive, the platform’s censorial speech policies, erotica on Joe Biden’s homepage (yes), and the battle of the business models that reshaped the internet.
Full story 👇
@PirateWires I wrote an inadvertent series deconstructing Medium's business model and unsustainability. By the way, Substack is in the same boat.
@micsolana @HarrisSockel The sublime medium dick energy of "No Thank You Mr Pecker" should have launched them into the stratosphere.
https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f
@PirateWires @ev is an outstanding person and one of the most successful inventors in all of media tech. Not everything succeeds. Medium helped personally with some writing projects and ev has done so much for many writers.
@PirateWires Is the lesson here simply that, in a world with an overwhelming amount of free content available, paywalled content needs to be consistently outstanding to be a viable business model, and few outlets are capable of producing content like that?
@micsolana @HarrisSockel “Safety” culture and union meddling turned Medium into another dying woke rag. Free speech built the platform; feelings-first HR bullshit killed it. Substack ate their lunch because talent flees censorship.
@micsolana @HarrisSockel Was a major leap forward for UI design, too. Done by Teehan + Lax. So much potential squandered.
@HarrisSockel This was great. I was a big fan of Medium from its earliest days and can remember tangibly feeling its collapse over time.
@HarrisSockel This post was so good and many lines cracked me up. “There were plants, jfyi.”
@PirateWires @micsolana I forgot all about Medium. I remember about a hundred years ago, Twitter shareholders were so desperate for upside, there was talk that Jack and Ev discussed merging their companies. Ultimately, they couldn't agree of course because they're both dickheads. $TWTR
@micsolana @HarrisSockel It was all tech slop and political rants. Substack is going in that direction already.
@micsolana @HarrisSockel Mike would love to discuss this privately with you if you have some personal insights
@PirateWires Was sad to see the platform fall.
Read it here: https://www.piratewires.com/p/what-happened-to-medium
@cynthiamcgillis <3 tysm
The wokeness and manual editorial amplification of the most left-wing content possible turned it into an extremely obnoxious platform, but my biggest complaint with Medium as a writer was that they changed the rules so many times it gave me whiplash.
I created an account there in 2016 and thought about migrating almost everything I had written online there. By 2023, they had gone snip/snap, snip/snap so many times that I gave up, deleted almost everything, and moved to Substack instead.
The editor and CMS itself were absolutely brilliant, with a lot of exciting innovations: very fast load time with minimal distraction, very SEO-friendly, the UI was very easy on the eyes, the highlighting tool was genius, and it was the only big platform I was aware of that let you set your own canonical URLs, which was an absolutely brilliant move.
But holy moly, the number of emails I got saying something like “Here’s our new partner program,” and then “Here’s our new NEW partner program,” was insane, and in every single case, it seemed like bad news.
They went from rewarding creators to punishing them and making them pay to be part of an ever-shrinking, already very shallow pool of meager resources. Plus, you never had any control of anything, and you DIDN’T OWN YOUR AUDIENCE, which is a capital crime for creative platforms.
Seemed like a bizarre case of a company that nailed the platform and infrastructure from a purely mechanical perspective but had no idea how to run an actual business behind it.
Today, Medium is basically the ultimate slop pond. It’s the 2026 version of eZineArticles (for those who remember).
Uninspired, unoriginal tripe designed to stroke the ego of the unintelligent, and politically correct masses obsessed with piloteness.
@PirateWires Never liked this site. Always hit with paywalls.
Glad people can just spin up a static site easier than ever now and say goodbye to such a socially hackable institution as Medium was
@micsolana @HarrisSockel damn, that's wild. never knew that's what sparked the pivot, kinda sad watching a platform lose its soul like that.
