Readers spend almost five million hours each month reading publications on Medium. Medium is the popular online publishing platform founded in 2012 by Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Medium’s use of an algorithmic timeline expands the audience.
Medium—the Popular Blogging Platform
Medium is a publishing platform for articles, blog posts, and stories. Writers can generate traffic and boost their readership via Series, the new platform that targets Medium’s mobile phone reading audience. Series allows writers to create stories that develop over time. Readers who subscribe to the writer’s Series will be notified about updates.
Recommendations grow the reader base. The more people who like the content by clicking on the heart icon, the more it will appear on readers’ timelines. Medium also lets bloggers know how many people viewed their articles and how many read it completely.
E-Readers and Mobile Phones Boost Serialized Fiction
Series is a concept targeting the on-the-go reader. It is a modern take on the 19th century serials that churned out short stories and boosted writers’ careers, now with mobile phone users in mind. Serials, then as now, were publications that published chunks of material episodically. Today writers can unfold their stories to be read on mobile phones by adding material over time.
In the Victorian era, serialization was a popular method of publishing stories. It made stories accessible to more people, created suspense and anticipation, and boosted readership by word-of- mouth. Dickens and his contemporaries used the series format prolifically and profitably.
The ubiquity of the serialized publication declined after the printing press made long novels affordable for the masses. However, with the creation of the internet and e-readers, this form of publishing novels is coming back in a big way. Medium is taking on JukePop, Amazon, and other online platforms that have re-established the popularity of the serial format. It is offering a bite-sized version of the serialized format.
Series Specially Designed for Mobile Phone Users
As more readers visited Medium on their phones, the platform’s creative thinkers conceived a new means for storytelling that complemented the screen constraints of mobile phones. Series offers writers a way to deliver their stories in a more immediate and dynamic format.
Readers can opt to receive notifications of new installments and save their places so they can return where they left off. Readers can provide feedback to the creator, who now can share deeper, more complex storylines with readers.
Writers can begin crafting their series on Medium’s app or online. Readers can select what they want by downloading or updating Medium’s Android or iOS app on their phones. Upon downloading or updating the app, phone users can tap the Series tab to begin reading the content.
