Ev Williams Is Sourcing Writers to Produce Original Content for Medium 3.0
Twitter and Medium founder Ev Williams.
Evan Williams, founder and CEO of Medium.com, was recently in New York meeting with writers and editors to discuss prospects of hiring more of them to produce original content for his platform. The high profile serial internet entrepreneur wants to pivot journalists to grow Medium 3.0 Partner Program, named so after the company’s latest major strategy shift away from ad revenue and toward user subscriptions.
Pivot on Journalists to Grow Medium 3.0
“I’m actually talking to editors while I’m out here,” Williams told FastCompany’s Brooklyn-based reporter Cale Guthrie Weissman. Apparently, these editors would focus on the big Medium 3.0-commissioned pieces and help curate the front page for subscribers.
Medium, a hybrid blogging platform/publisher, now wants subscribers to provide most of its revenue instead of relying on ad revenue. To achieve this, it has to iron out a few things first, including hiring an executive editor and having a brand-new editorial team in place in the next quarter or so.
Medium rolled out its “partners” program earlier this year to give premium content to paying subscribers. The general idea is that the content individual subscribers most “engage” with receives the lion’s share of the revenue. So if you are a Medium writer/publisher and subscribers share or “clap” your story more often, you are allocated the lion’s share of subscriber’s funds.
Now that the dust has settled on the new revenue model, and the system is becoming more or less formalized, Williams is out making a sustained pitch about why people should turn back to Medium.
Pitch to Turn Once Again to Medium
“It’s looking very promising so far in terms of the engagement with the content,” Williams said of Medium’s recent business shift and progress made so far. “It really enables something new–a different model, which I’m feeling optimistic about.”
Citing a healthy subscription growth without providing numbers, he added the new system “shows the signs of a system {where} all the parts are working.”
This is not the first time Medium is making such a claim. The company has given similar narratives over the last few years as it moved to and fro experimenting with different revenue models. However, its latest call urging publishers to use Medium once again as a supplementary distribution point seems to be working. Some big publishers have headed the call, including the New York Times, Bloomberg and The Guardian.
“I think, in the future, most publishers will certainly still have their home pages,” Williams said, “Platforms will serve as distribution points for different types of content.”
In Williams’ projection, subscribers will pay for the ease of getting curated content in one bundle on platforms. That’s what Medium is pitching to both readers and writers. And Williams is currently signing on more writers and building out an editorial team to help that projection happen on his platform.
