Four years into a subscription strategy, Medium still doesn’t spend money to acquire subscribers

By Max Willens

For most of the past three years, Medium spared no expense producing content for its platform and its publications. But it seems to have been philosophically opposed to spending money to market that content or the brands that produced it.

Over the past three years, Medium has spent next to nothing on advertising and has not spent any money at all on customer acquisition, preferring instead to let its platform and the organic reach of its content drive subscriber growth, current and former staffers said.

In fact, the amount of money Medium has spent on advertising and promotion has been declining since Medium began ramping up its publication-focused strategy. The platform spent just over $1 million on advertising in 2018, slightly less than $1 million in 2019, and less than $500,000 in 2020, according to Kantar data.

Thanks in part to its large audience — a spokesperson said Medium attracts around 170 million unique users per month (SimilarWeb [200 million monthly visits] and Comscore [19 million monthly unique users] estimates diverged wildly) — Medium, a startup which has raised $132 million in venture capital to date, managed to build a strong foundation organically, piling up 725,000 subscribers paying either $5 a month of $50 a year, according to a current staffer. (Axios originally reported Medium’s subscriber totals).

That number would be the envy of many subscription-focused publishers, but it also fell short of the 1 million subscriber target the company set in 2019. Medium’s subscriber growth began to slow down in the second half of 2020. Medium also slashed commissioning budgets last year, and on March 24, Medium founder Ev Williams announced that the platform had scaled back its investment in its publications, which range from the tech-focused OneZero to Zora, a publication created for Black women, and offered buyouts to the publications’ staffers. The company’s head of editorial, Siobhan O’Connor, will leave later this year, Williams wrote. Content will be supervised dually by Scott Lamb and Jermaine Hall, and the two will report in to Karene Tropen, who will assume the newly created role of svp of marketing and content.

“We had no illusion these publications were going to pay for themselves in the short term,” Williams wrote. “The bet was that we could develop these brands, and they would develop loyal audiences that would grow the overall Medium subscriber base. What’s happened, though, is the Medium subscriber base has continued to grow, while our publication’s audiences haven’t.”

Since that announcement, many Medium staffers have announced on Twitter that they are taking buy-outs.

“It didn’t surprise me that there was a pivot,” one current staffer said, before adding, “It was maybe two steps further than we would have thought.”

Current and former employees said that while Medium did promote the platform and its publications using organic distribution, there was a feeling internally that the platform would drive its own success on the subscriber acquisition front.

But even the largest platforms spend money on …read more

Source:: Digiday