Interviews with 14 current and former Medium employees portray a dysfunctional company; sources say Medium has 700K paid subs, suggesting $35M+ in revenue
Casey Newton's interviews with 14 current and former employees land on a company that has been here before: back in 2015, nearly all of Medium's sites were reported in upheaval, and the new reporting describes a similar dysfunction at the core. What has changed is the business picture underneath.
The piece puts hard numbers on a trajectory the related coverage has tracked for years — from an estimated 200K–400K paying subscribers worth at least $10M a year in 2019, to 'several hundred thousand' by mid-2020, to 700K paid subscriptions implying $35M+ today. Growth is real, but the pace looks modest for a company that bet everything on subscriptions, which sets up the tension between scale and culture that CEO Tony Stubblebine's later turnaround account would have to answer.
First-order effects
Medium's leadership gets a public credibility hit at the exact moment its subscriber economics are exposed: writers deciding where to publish can now weigh a documented dysfunctional workplace against a platform growing far slower than its subscription-first ambitions implied.
The disclosed $35M+ revenue figure gives outsiders, investors, and prospective hires a baseline for judging whether Medium's headcount and strategy are sustainable — scrutiny the company previously avoided by keeping its numbers vague.
Second-order effects
Competing writing platforms gain a recruiting argument: they can court disaffected Medium writers by pointing to reporting that ties the platform's stalled growth directly to internal dysfunction rather than market conditions.
The dysfunction narrative raises the bar for any turnaround claim — Stubblebine's later account of right-sizing the company and reaching profitability after burning roughly $2.6M a month in 2022 has to overcome a published record that the problems were cultural, not just financial.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — big subscription bets stalling in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-subscribers range — platforms like Medium end up leaning on alternative revenue lines, and Medium's later adoption of the Really Simple Licensing standard to charge AI scrapers fits exactly that pivot: monetizing the archive when the subscription engine tops out.
The episode reinforces the subscription scale trap as a structural constraint on independent publishing platforms: without venture-scale growth, culture and cost discipline become the survival variables, favoring operators willing to shrink deliberately rather than chase journalism ambitions.
The trend: Subscription-first publishing platforms are discovering a growth ceiling around their core memberships, forcing either disciplined shrink-to-profitability turnarounds or new revenue lines like AI-content licensing.
Medium's original journalism was not converting free readers to paid subscribers. Surprisingly, what seemed to convert readers most reliably were random stories on the digital content farm that had sprung up around its high-gloss publications https://www.platformer.news/ ...
This just keeps making me madder. I think the main reason Defector has been successful so far is that our standards for success are “pay for itself and its employees, not make a billion dollars.” https://twitter.com/...
“Medium entered the year with more than 700,000 paid subscriptions, putting it on track for more than $35 million in revenue.” Wow. And that wasn't enough. jfc https://www.theverge.com/...
In the VC world the term is “lifestyle business” as in a business that lets you and your employees live a comfortable lifestyle and “that's all” and it's used like “there's nothing wrong with running a lifestyle business” in a tone of voice implying there's something wrong https:…
And here it is: my best effort to understand what happened after Medium invested millions in its latest embrace of original journalism, only to begin pulling back when Ev Williams didn't like what he saw. https://www.theverge.com/...
What's worse, a lot of average people have been kept in the dark about this fact and still believe that any business that fails does so because it just wasn't successful enough, when “success” has become completely divorced from reality. https://twitter.com/...
I've written about this before: the financialized mindset has essentially eliminated the idea of the successful mid-sized enterprise from the American business vernacular. When I was in B-school, for example, all our projects were basically, “Come up with a $1B idea.” https://twi…
“scale” has poisoned all of our media owners into thinking $35m in revenue isn't “enough,” even though it would pay hundreds of people living wages and benefits. everything has to be an empire or it's nothing at all. what medium has done (again) is shameful https://twitter.com/..…
Ev Williams decided on a whim to shut down a program for publishers in 2017, leaving countless under-funded publications hanging. And it's only gotten worse since. Burn Medium all the way to the ground and salt the earth when you're done. https://www.theverge.com/...