August was the first month that online publishing platform Medium ever turned a profit.
That’s according to Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, who posted on Wednesday: a summary Stubblebine says Medium had more than 1 million subscribers as of April, and that more members “than ever before” are on the company’s paid plans. (He did not volunteer to elaborate on this second claim.)
Stubblebein had previously pledged that Medium would reach profitability this year.
“There’s a side story about how good engineering saved us money on server bills,” Stubblebine wrote. “But mostly it was as simple as building something members would want to subscribe to… Even as we cut other costs to make Medium profitable, we paid writers more.”
As a private company, Medium doesn’t disclose its revenue. But given that the company’s cheapest monthly plan is $5 and its cheapest annual plan is $50, we can estimate that Medium’s revenue is currently somewhere around $50 million (on the low end) or $60 million (on the high end). AppFigures, an app analytics firm, tells TechCrunch that it believes Medium has made $8.9 million in 2024 so far from its mobile app alone — a 69% increase from mobile revenue in the same period last year ($5.3 million).
Founded in 2012, Medium hosts a mix of blogs, newsletters, and other forms of written word. It has been accused in the past of being a breeding ground for scams and get-rich-quick listicles. But as Stubblebine points out in his post, the company has made a number of efforts to improve its overall content mix.
In 2023, Medium launched Boost, an initiative to refine high-quality articles for readers. That same year, the platform ramped up its moderation efforts, removing more than a million spam posts (Medium removed nearly 10 million posts in the past month, according to Stubblebine ) and launching a program to invite published authors to verify their identities by claiming their books. (Medium says more than 9,000 authors have signed up for the program.)
In recent months, Medium has also expanded its Partner Program, which allows writers to earn money based on the engagement their stories receive from Medium’s member base. It also launched a higher-priced membership that offers the ability to pay more money directly to authors.
One area chosen by Medium no Investing in AI is generative. The company is currently banning AI-powered crawlers from its site, and has hinted at recruiting a coalition of other platforms and publishers “to help define the future of fair use in the age of AI.”