Medium Debuts Series Story Format

Doing its best Snapchat impression, Medium is rolling out a mobile-friendly story format named Series. Like Snapchat Stories, Series users can post photos and concise bit of text in collections that piece together over time.

Unlike Snapchat’s popular service, however, the content on Series doesn’t disappear, there’s no limit to the number of collections they can share.

Rather than replace the long-form content that Medium is known for, Series is meant to serve a supplementary role, according to Katie Zhu a product engineer at Medium.

It’s “for readers who just can’t wait for that next [long-form] post,” Zhu notes in a new blog post. That said, Zhu suggested that Series signals a new direction for Medium.

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“This is our first step toward building a new way to read on Medium that’s both seamless and serialized,” she said. Readers can opt to get a push notification every time creators add a new Series installment.

The service also encourages readers to offer feedback in the form of claps, which let creators know how they’re doing. More broadly, Medium is clearly experimenting with new models as its core business struggles.

Just last month, co-founder Ev Williams -- of Twitter fame -- saidMedium was planning to debut a subscription service.

“This quarter is the goal -- to launch the first version,” Williams told attendees of the Upfront Summit.

In January, the company said it was cutting a third of its staff. The layoffs of some 50 employees would mostly impact sales, support, and “other business functions,” it said at the time.

Medium also announced plans to close its offices in New York and Washington, D.C. -- although some staffers were expected to continue to work remotely from those areas.

At least in terms of growth, Medium does some have momentum. Year-over-year, readers and published posts were up about 300%, according to internal figures.

Yet, as it has grown as a destination for premium publisher content, Medium’s monetization efforts appear to have lagged behind.

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