• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 29, 2015

Medium, the content platform pioneered by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, just raised $57 million in a round spearheaded by Andreessen Horowitz.

Also participating in this latest round were Google Ventures, Greylock Partners, Obvious Ventures and The Chernin Group.

Founded in 2012 -- and released to the public in late 2013 -- Medium has recently shown signs of a business strategy. Among other efforts, BMW recently signed on to sponsor a collection of posts on the platform.

As for users, Medium currently claims roughly 20,000 weekly content contributors and “millions” of readers. Regardless, the company doesn’t focus on pageviews, unique visitors, or click metrics, according to Andy Doyle Medium’s head of operations.

“We don’t litter the platform with ads that are low quality, high clutter,” Doyle explains in a new blog post. “We don’t tolerate bad behavior in the community. And we don’t violate people’s privacy.”

Rather, the platform is trying its best to “surface quality,” according to Doyle. “Every action on Medium is shared with our network, meaning everyone is an influencer.”

Though some have declared the age of blogging to be dead, blog-like publishing platforms continue to evolve.

Facebook, for one, recently reimagined its long-neglected Notes service as a platform for reading and writing long-form content. Simply a test at the moment, only select users are seeing the simplified Notes format. With the new Notes, Facebook is clearly trying to discourage people from going elsewhere to publish and consume long-form content.

The social giant must also be aware of a desire by some users to digest larger chunks of written content. For example, some social media users have embraced “screenshorts” -- screenshots of relatively large bodies text shared via social media channels.

 Following suit, Tumblr recently rolled out support for long-form content and mobile messaging.

Looking ahead, Medium is planning to announce a number of new product features and partnerships at an event on Oct. 7.