Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Platforms/Media: Ev Williams Raised $132 Million for Medium, Now He Needs More

From Business Insider, Nov. 8:

$132 million later, Ev Williams says he is raising even more money for Medium
  • Ev Williams needs more money for Medium, which he says is still not profitable.
  • Medium has received $132 million from investors so far.
  • "We are coming out of this phase where it was assumed that the best quality journalism is free in unlimited quantities," he said.
LISBON — Ev Williams, the Twitter cofounder who has so far raised $132 million in investment for his longform publishing platform Medium, says the company is still not profitable and he will be raising more money. 

The announcement — made today at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon — will raise eyebrows because Medium is not yet profitable, Williams told Business Insider earlier in the day. It was founded in 2012, two years after Williams stepped down as Twitter CEO. 

The site currently has 90 million unique users each month, and publishes 20,000 articles per day, mostly from writers creating one-off articles. It recently moved away from selling advertising as a revenue model to a subscription paywall, in which readers are asked for money if they see more than three stories per month. 

Williams said Medium's last investment round was in early 2016. "We will be raising more money but there is nothing to disclose on that." 

The investment will go into Williams' effort to make Medium a bit more like a vast, thoughtful magazine. What started as a longform blogging platform is looking more and more like The Atlantic crossed with Wikipedia....
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