An introduction to our evolved brand identity
A little background
Over the past several months, Medium has been rolling out a series of upgrades, all of which are helping us build a more relational Medium.
One of the most notable upgrades we’ve made is allowing more creative expression for the writers and brands on our platform, so that your home on Medium can feel more like you. It was only fitting that as we build a more expressive Medium for creators, we should follow suit by better expressing our own brand. Which is why, this year, we updated the Medium brand identity, which we are excited to unveil today.
The foundation: the brand behind the branding
Medium started with a simple purpose: to deepen people’s understanding of the world, and spread ideas that matter. We did this by giving people a simple medium — a blank page — for their ideas to reach what is now a global community of over 170 million readers. Most importantly, as an open platform, anyone can have a voice on Medium, regardless of background, affiliation, or expertise, and share their thoughts directly, independently, and unfiltered. We’re proud to give these voices a home to grow, connect, and spark real, nuanced conversations — as well as the potential to instigate change. …
An easy way to export subscriber email addresses
Earlier this year, we launched newsletters for publications on Medium: a new way to build relationships and share stories with readers. We recently announced some important updates to newsletters — including an enhanced editor and email scheduling — and continue to improve them based on user feedback. One of the latest improvements is the newsletter mailing list.
Did you know that as an editor of a Medium newsletter, you have direct access to a list of subscribers?
That’s right. …
A unique Medium profile and address
Your Medium profile is where readers get to know more about you, to see the face behind the name, the mind behind the words. For writers, it’s a place to showcase ideas for the millions of curious eyes and hungry minds that flock to Medium each day. Your profile should be every bit as distinct as the stories you publish in it. But it isn’t. Today, we take the first step towards changing that.
In an effort to empower individual creators, we’ve taken what we learned from developing expressive tools for publications and brought it to everyone’s Medium profile. You can now make your profile a true reflection of yourself in ways that you couldn’t before. …
Iterating and improving Medium for you
Following up on our announcement last week:
As new questions arise, we’ll update the FAQ at the bottom of this page. One question that came up was around topics on the stats page. Why were they removed? From the FAQ:
We removed topics from the story stats page in order to reduce the focus on topics in distribution. Because our recommendations engine uses several different signals to distribute relevant stories to readers, such as popularity, your reading history, readers who are similar to you, etc., …
Medium is becoming more relational in order to give writers more freedom and agency over building and maintaining relationships with their audience. Our goal is to create the best of both worlds: An open and simple platform where anyone can publish — once, occasionally, or often — that also allows for deeper connections between readers and writers. We want to simplify the publishing process. Today we made the following changes:
- Every post published on Medium is eligible for further distribution. Writers no longer need to submit their stories for curation review.
- Only writers enrolled in the Medium Partner Program will have the option to place their stories behind the metered paywall. If they choose to do so, their stories are eligible to earn money. Medium will no longer put posts behind the paywall in exchange for distribution. …
Medium Writers Newsletter: Writing tips, updates, and spotlights
September is for new beginnings. Getting organized. Starting fresh, coming out of the brief lull of August. This year, August was different. Instead of traveling for weddings or vacations, it was staycations, maybe moving, and if possible, taking a break or at least slowing down to reflect and recharge. Perhaps in that time, you came up with new creative ideas to get started on this month.
To kick off the newsletter, we’re sharing a few highlights from Morgan Jerkins’ interview in Forge by Kelli María Korducki. …
Upcoming features and a status update
We’ve had a busy summer.
Last month, we announced new features coming to our publishing tools — specifically, more customizability, frictionless reading, and a better space for short(er)-form content. Last week, we announced our new mobile app, which is a complete rethink of how to seamlessly keep up with your favorite writers — and find new ones. These new versions are currently in beta and opening up more widely over the next few weeks as we incorporate user feedback and make them better.
These two pieces are just part of a comprehensive upgrade to the platform, which we are in the process of implementing. …
Writing newsletters just got easier.
Since launching Medium Newsletters in June, we’ve been happy to see many publications on Medium use them. Our last post noted improvements to come and we’re excited to share our latest progress.
If you use Newsletters, you may have recently noticed a change to the editing tool. …
Helping you build stronger connections with the writers and publications you love
For millions of people, Medium’s mobile app is their window to discover and read stories from writers they trust and subject-matter experts across a wide variety of topics. …
We appreciate the feedback about the language in our updated Terms of Service that focuses on your content rights. We first responded by preparing a short blog post explaining the updates.
We’ve now edited the Terms of Service to more clearly reflect what we said in that post.
Here’s the passage we’ve updated:
Rights and Ownership
You retain your rights to any content you submit, post or display on or through the Services.
Unless otherwise agreed in writing, by submitting, posting, or displaying content on or through the Services, you grant Medium a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, and sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your content in all media formats and distribution methods now known or later developed on the Services. …
