• by Sara Guaglione , July 22, 2016

Nonprofit digital news publisher ThinkProgress is moving its content to Medium in the next month, making it the largest Web site in the platform's portfolio.

ThinkProgress attracts between 6.5 million and 9 million unique visitors monthly, per CNN Money.

ThinkProgress is the editorial project borne from progressive advocacy group Center for American Progress Action Fund. The site's traffic has gone up 24% in the last two years, according to comScore. The size of the publisher's staff has doubled in the last four years to 37 today.

ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Judd Legum told CNNMoney that the move was instigated by the difficulty of hosting their own site and competing with Facebook's new News Feed algorithm.

“It's really impossible for an independent publisher to develop and maintain their own publishing platform in this environment,” Legum said, adding that most of ThinkProgress’ tech resources were spent on making sure the site didn't crash.

“Now, we can let Medium develop the technical product, and we can focus on writing stories,” he said.

In 2005, expectations for user experience "were low," he explained, as most people were coming to sites directly from desktop computers.

"Now people are coming through a variety of devices and usually through Google or social networks. If your site doesn't load instantly, they'll just go back to Twitter or Facebook," Legum said.

Often described as a blogging platform and social network, Medium hosts and promotes posts from publishers as well as offers branded content opportunities.

Created by Snapchat co-founder Ev Williams, the company had more than a dozen independent sites migrate to its publishing platform a few months ago, including The Awl, Pacific Standard and The Bold Italic. In April, Medium raised $50 million in investments from Spark Capital, bringing its total money raised in the last year to more than $130 million, according to re/Code.