How lucky are we? We fell in love with this platform and got to experience it on one side as users and writers and readers, and then here we are, getting to continue and expand on the legacy of this company. Is Medium worth it in 2026? For writers, should you come here to share your story? For readers, are you going to find something worth reading? For editors, is it worth trying to build a publication here on Medium in 2026? To answer this question, I asked our CEO, Tony Stubblebine, who obviously had a very biased answer that yes, of course it is. And I agree with him. Again, also biased. I'm a Medium employee, but before I was a Medium employee, I was a Medium fan for I think seven years before I ended up getting hired here. As you watch this, I hope you enjoy it. I hope you feel a little bit of the magic that we both feel. We both really genuinely love writing on Medium. We love reading on Medium. And I hope that if this gives you the information to help you make the decision, that you join us in 2026. Okay, enjoy the interview.
Hey everybody, thank you so much for joining me on this video. I'm super excited to have the CEO of Medium, Tony Stubblebine, to explain to me in this year 2026, is Medium worth it? Who's it worth it for? What kind of writing should you be doing on Medium? What kind of reading should you be doing on Medium? And what the plans are for the future. Tony, for anybody who doesn't know who you are, go ahead and introduce yourself.
Good to be back. We're redoing an interview from two years ago. Yes, I am the CEO of Medium, but I think of ourselves this time around as just co-workers at our favorite company on the entire internet. The two of us were heavy Medium users before we were employees. And so we get to be on the inside trying to make Medium the thing, kind of perfect this thing that we already loved.
Yeah, we have a shared history of being super fans and super users of Medium. For those of you who don't know who I am, I am Zulie Raine. Two years ago when I first did this video, I was just Medium's number one fan and now I'm a Medium employee, as you can tell from my jumper. And it's been really great to be behind the curtain and see Tony and the rest of the Medium team putting into practice my belief, which is that Medium is the best place to write and read on the internet.
So I guess just answer the title question. Is Medium worth it in 2026? Just any way that you would interpret that.
100%. Writing is everything to me and I think that our mission is to make writing as easy as possible for everyone. I would call Medium almost like the anti-social media platform. We want to give a place where everyone has a voice, rather than this is a place for writers, this is a place for people who write. Everyone writes and everyone has thoughts and stories that are worth sharing. And our job is just to make that as easy as possible. There's nowhere on the internet that makes it as easy to write as Medium does.
So, Medium, I'm just paraphrasing what you've said, Medium is for people who have a story to tell and want an easy place, an easy way to share it.
Yes. But can we dig into people who have a story to tell? Like who doesn't have a story to tell? I think that's one of the amazing lessons of the internet is that whatever thought you have, big or small, there's someone else who's going to validate it by saying that was really helpful to hear. You know, it could be you've gone through a traumatic life event and you want to share that. Or it could be you have a new opinion on your favorite screwdriver. All of those things matter to someone somewhere. And even if it doesn't reach a reader, there's something inherently healthy about writing, which is a lot of times you don't know what you think until you write it down. And just the act of writing for those of us who do it, I think we feel really fulfilled afterwards.
This gives us a chance to talk about not just who is Medium for, but for the people who come to Medium to write, what do they get? I think the hardest thing about writing online everywhere else is how hard it is to find an audience. And so Medium does this amazing job of surfacing these little sub-communities that we call publications that anyone can go submit to and find an audience for the thing that you're trying to say. My own experience of that: I'd written a lot on Medium about things that are my professional expertise. But one day I had something to say about running, which is not my professional expertise, and I found one of the big publications on Medium about running, Runner's Life, and I submitted it and they published it. So suddenly I was hearing from all these runners about this running story that I had written. I wouldn't have had that opportunity to share that thought with other people anywhere else because building an audience on the internet is one of the hardest things possible.
I don't think it's just readers. It's not like you publish on Medium, you're going to find 10,000 people to click on your story. I think what Medium does, in my perspective, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this too, is not just readers but relevant readers. So you write in the runner publication, you get runners who come to be like, 'Oh yeah, this is interesting' or 'You're wrong about this and here's why I think so.' Which both kinds of feedback are fun to get.
Right? Relevant. So I think there's reach but also relevant reach, and then this kind of community. Those all kind of go hand in hand for me.
We've gotten really lost in the numbers and I don't think that's the point of writing or sharing. It's to make a connection with another person. And that is more important and more fulfilling and actually more rare and harder to do. If Medium can connect you to thoughtful people, which I think we're excellent at doing because Medium is probably one of the most thoughtful places on the internet, you know, it just draws thoughtful, curious people, it creates the space for a unique connection with your readers.
Let's talk a little bit about who does well on Medium in 2026. Whose stories are reaching these relevant readers?
That's a tough question. Define well, right? If you are writing something unique and powerful, it will get connected to someone who needs to hear it, and so that one-to-one interaction is very strong for those people. If you're defining well by sort of commercial viability, we'll say, which is definitely a subset of why people write on Medium. If you're a professional, if you have a job and you can write for other people that have that job, that always does really well. And so we see a lot of technology, programming, data science, AI, design, entrepreneurship, marketing that does really well on Medium. I think the thing that also just like the world is hungry for the truth. Where can you go and just hear what a person is actually experiencing? Anytime there's a conflict, you know, Ukraine or Gaza, you want to hear from someone who's actually on the ground, not people that are spinning it for you, but what is someone's lived experience? If you're hearing kind of politicized debates about health and health decisions, Medium is a place where you can actually hear from the experts who are out there doing the research. It's always the case that everyone is an expert in their own life and that it's an opportunity for you to contribute to some collective intelligence, some global collective intelligence, by inserting, you know, here was my experience.
Since coming to work at Medium for coming up to almost two years now, I think about the writers that I've seen doing well for like a value of 'well' that I would qualify. And I think you're right that there's a lot of different ways that can look like. There's this guy who wrote one story, maybe two, about what it was like to work with the pope right after he passed, and a lot of people got to see that story and read what that was like. For that writer, I think it was really powerful. He didn't have a blog, he didn't have a mailing list that I know of. He came, he wrote, he shared, he reached. That story did well. That was what Medium readers really wanted—this really crucial context of okay, this big news thing happened, how do I process that as a regular person who can help me understand that. There are people who put their stories behind the Medium paywall. So again, if you're new to Medium, we have what I think is a really cool and unique payment model. You put your story behind the paywall and then when a paying Medium member—that is someone who pays the $5 or whatever monthly membership fee to read paywalled stories—when they read your story and they tell our system that they find it valuable in some way, they earn money through the Medium partner program. So there's that kind of value too of writing stories that really resonate with our members. And then there's also what you were kind of alluding to. Some people never touch the paywall. They don't go what I would consider to be viral, but they reach these relevant readers. They're writing for their bosses. They're writing for their co-workers. They're writing to get freelance clients, consulting gigs. I know of at least one marketer who I actually wrote a case study about who got headhunted for a new head of marketing job off the back of her writing on Medium, which I think is such a cool story.
I don't fault people who have the dream of being a full-time creator, but I do like to caution against the creator economy as a bit of a fad. It would be a mistake to look at the creator economy without looking also at the expert economy. A lot of people find professional opportunity by writing about their job as a way to create a portfolio. And it's actually pretty rare to do that. As a result, you stand out. It's a way to demonstrate your expertise and your skill and your point of view about your job in a way that I think a lot of people find helps them get new jobs, helps them find people that want to work with them, helps them if they're contractors or consultants. In that giant sphere of what people write about on Medium, in that professional sphere, I think a lot of people are basically ignoring the whole idea of a paywall on Medium and just writing for professional clout. And that is to my mind a really valuable service to the internet.
This actually segues me nicely to one of my points I was going to ask, which is how do we protect writers from AI? And this segues nicely because yes, some of the best, most valuable writing is this professional 'Here's what I do in my job. Here's all this thinking about my job or my life or whatever challenge I've been struggling with.' But at least I have experienced on the internet that that kind of writing is increasingly harder to find, because it's being drowned out by—I think the term I've seen is slop. Do you—yeah, I know this is something a lot of writers worry about. Are we doing anything to protect them from the rising tide of slop? Is there anything happening that we can share that lets us make our stance clearly about what kind of writing we do and don't value on the platform?
The point of Medium is to pull human experience out and get it into written form so that we can share it. And so it is literally at odds with AI slop, which is make-believe. We're looking for something real. People try to post it on Medium and sometimes get it read successfully, but we always think when that happens, it's to the detriment of the readers and to the other writers here. The long-term unique value of Medium is that we're already built around human curators, human curators at the publication level and human curators inside of Medium that are constantly working to reduce the amount of slop that gets posted to Medium and more importantly to elevate the human stories so that they get seen instead of the slop. Sometimes we're doing a great job of that. Sometimes it's kind of a struggle as we fight a new wave of slop lords, as some people call them. But it's definitely our long-term intention to provide a home for real, authentic human stories. We just think they're so important and AI honestly is nothing without access to those. There's no such thing as AI replacing the need for that because the AI is not out there living a human life and so can't generate a human lesson.
Yeah. Well, that's a relief to hear again as a writer, especially since it feels like many other platforms are kind of going the opposite direction. They're embracing AI wholeheartedly with no guardrails or any kind of thoughtfulness about it. So it's—I like, again now that I'm a Medium employee, I like working at a company that takes this kind of thing seriously and is deeply thinking about what kind of stories have value to readers.
Imagine you're a brand new writer. You have a story to tell. You have something cool that you want to share about your cats or your garden or your running or whatever. And you're thinking about coming on to Medium, what would you expect? What should you expect as a new writer coming on to Medium? What is your experience going to be like?
