Medium has had a great 2016. The publishing platform, created in 2012 by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, saw its monthly visitors reach 60 million by December — a year-over-year increase of 140 percent.
Medium was a flurry of activity in 2016, with over 7.5 million posts published (up from 1.9 million posts at the end of 2015). The variety of content available on Medium also boosted engagement rates. Over the past 12 months, total time reading tripled to reach 4.5 million hours per month. Altogether, readers spent a staggering 3.6 millennia reading together on Medium in 2016 (that’s over 31.5 million hours).
Medium’s most popular content categories included politics, sports, Donald Trump, startup, and tech, among others. Despite boasting personal articles by celebrities, politicians, and business leaders, a number of the biggest blog posts on Medium were published by its general users. There was Talia Jane’s open letter calling out her then CEO for underpaying employees — the post subsequently went viral. Similarly, Penny Kim’s account of being scammed out of an income by her Silicon Valley employer also found extensive coverage in the media — it ended the year as the most read Medium article for San Francisco. Additionally, Jordan Belamire’s article describing her virtual reality groping resulted in a host of responses, and thousands of shares.
However, by and large the biggest articles were related to the general election and its outcome. The most widely read article of 2016, entitled “History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump,” was authored by academic and historian Tobias Stone.
The following were the top 10 posts of 2016, in order of popularity:
- History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump
- Dear democrats, read this if you do not understand why Trump won
- An open letter to my CEO
- Let me remind you f*ckers who I am
- Stop making everything perfect for your kid
- How a TV sitcom triggered the downfall of Western civilization
- The “other side” is not dumb
- Admit it. The Clinton email controversy bothers you, yet you don’t actually know what the Clinton email controversy is
- How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
- The disturbing details of the Derrick Rose gang rape case
Meanwhile, some of the biggest public figures and celebs to publish to Medium in 2016 included Ben Stiller, former Knicks head coach Derek Fisher, and Vice President Joe Biden.
Earlier this year, Medium raised $50 million in funding, which went toward strengthening its resources in order to deal with the increase in demand for its content. In June, it acquired Superfeedr: a unified application programming interface (API) that can handle RSS, Atom, or JSON feeds.
Correction: This article originally stated Medium has doubled its users this year. In fact, the site has increased its visitors by 140 percent since last year. It has now been amended.
