Medium wound down its owned publications, offering buyouts to all 75 editorial staff

An open online publishing platform funded by a $5/month membership.

That owned publications full of acclaimed journalism would give the free platform a premium 'halo' and convert readers into $5-a-month subscribers

$132M in venture capital; last round 2016, with Williams funding the company out of his own pocket thereafter

In 2018 Medium relaunched its push into original journalism, hiring editors at generous pay (freelancers at $1 a word) and launching owned publications — OneZero for tech, Elemental for health, Zora for Black and brown women. The idea went back to 2012: professionally written stories would create a 'halo' over user-generated content that a subscription could monetize.

The journalism earned acclaim — OneZero's reporting forced out a SoftBank-backed CEO, the Zora Canon book list reached NPR — and subscriptions grew strongly at first. But budgets were cut again and again, paid subscriptions flatlined in 2020, and staff stories were not converting readers; what converted best were random content-farm posts found via Google and Facebook. A union drive fell one vote short. Medium's answer to Substack, codenamed Hopscotch, paid advances like $25,000 to Susan Orlean — a tenth of Substack's headline deals.

Williams offered voluntary buyouts to all roughly 75 editorial employees — five months' severance, six months' healthcare — winding down the owned-publications experiment. Medium's COO and VP of engineering had already left.

It is the third act of Medium's long experiment with paying for journalism, after the 2015 layoffs and the 2017 membership shift — this time dismantling the publications themselves.

The conversion data cut against the entire premise: acclaimed staff journalism converted worse than content-farm posts found through Google and Facebook.

The union vote failing by one vote, then buyouts for the whole editorial staff, made it a case study in how platform companies and newsrooms misread each other.

Prestige content converts less reliably than SEO luck. If you never tell creators which metric they're judged on, you will eventually judge them by the metric nobody tracked.

As of the March 2021 article, buyouts were voluntary and outstanding; Williams had taken personal command as CEO, de facto COO and head of product, while the COO and VP of engineering departed. Amplify stood as the core of the future, with Medium still committing rhetorically to 'high-quality editorial and to the open platform model' in its statement to The Verge.