Medium CEO Ev Williams says he will be raising more money; Medium has raised $132M, has 90M MAUs, and publishes 20K articles per day
- Ev Williams needs more money for Medium, which he says is still not profitable. — Medium has received $132 million from investors so far.
Context & Ripple Effects
Medium's raise comes on top of a steady climb up the venture ladder: a $57M round at a reported $400M valuation in 2015, then a $50M Series C led by Spark Capital at a reported $600M with Ben Horowitz and Judy Estrin joining the board. The company has already committed to a business-model shift, having announced plans for publisher monetization via paywalls and premium content back in 2016.
What makes this round notable is that the monetization bet has not yet paid off — Williams says Medium is still unprofitable despite 90M monthly users and 20K articles per day — so new capital is effectively buying time for the subscription model to mature.
First-order effects
- A fresh raise extends Medium's runway while it remains unprofitable, letting Williams keep investing in the subscription push rather than cutting costs or selling.
- Investors are being asked to underwrite scale metrics — 90M MAUs, 20K daily articles — rather than earnings, which pressures Medium to convert that audience into paying readers.
Second-order effects
- Subscription revenue becomes the credibility test for the next valuation: within months of this announcement, sources put Medium at 200K-400K paying subscribers worth at least ~$10M a year, the number any future investor will scrutinize.
- Fresh capital also preserves optionality on the M&A front — weeks later Williams was reportedly in preliminary talks about buying New York Media (parent of New York Magazine), a deal sources said was unlikely to progress.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, independent publishing platforms end up structurally dependent on repeated venture rounds until subscription income covers costs — trading ownership dilution for the time needed to prove reader-paid models can replace ad-scale economics.
The trend: Consumer publishing platforms are bridging from venture-funded audience scale to subscription-funded sustainability through successive raises, with each round priced against how fast paying readers replace unprofitable reach.