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Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine reveals the company has been profitable since August 2024 after a tough turnaround
July 11, 2025
On Friday, Medium’s CEO Tony Stubblebine announced that the popular publishing platform has remained profitable since August of last year, marking a significant milestone after a prolonged period of financial struggle. Stubblebine shared an in-depth account of the challenging journey to reach profitability, which involved major product pivots, financial restructuring, cost-cutting, and painful organizational changes.
When Stubblebine took the helm in 2022, Medium was losing roughly $2.6 million per month, with a declining subscriber base and exhausted investor funding. The company also lacked any potential acquirer, leaving it with a stark choice: “make Medium profitable or shut down.”
Medium’s struggles partly stemmed from its original business model, which offered a single, bundled subscription that allowed any writer on the platform to earn revenue. The company’s efforts to incorporate professional editorial content, while intended to raise quality, inadvertently drew attention away from the platform’s core of amateur writers sharing personal stories and lessons from life experiences. This tension hurt Medium’s identity and subscriber growth.
At the time, Medium had about 760,000 paying members, but the company was bleeding cash. Stubblebine focused on product innovations to drive engagement and revenue, including:
Introducing Boost, a feature adding human expertise to content recommendations
Revising the Partner Program to better reward thoughtful, quality writing
Launching a Featuring tool to allow publications to curate and promote relevant stories
On the financial and governance side, Medium was burdened with $37 million in loans and faced $225 million in liquidation preferences held by investors, meaning investors had to be paid back before any employees could see returns. The company’s governance structure was complicated, requiring approval from five separate investor groups for major decisions, slowing progress.
To fix this, Medium undertook a difficult but necessary investor restructuring:
Renegotiated loans and converted debt to equity
Eliminated liquidation preferences
Simplified governance to a single tranche of investors
Sold off two acquisitions and closed down a third
This recapitalization process was delicate. Stubblebine admitted that he was initially reluctant to renegotiate with investors but realized it was essential to save the company. He described the challenge of finding a “sweet spot” where the business was valuable enough to rescue but not so valuable that investors had other options.
In the recapitalization, only 6 out of 113 investors participated, agreeing to dilute their stakes and give up special rights like liquidation preferences and governance control. Stubblebine praised several VCs who were cooperative partners, including Ross Fubini at XYZ, Mark Suster at Upfront, Greylock, Spark, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Medium also drastically cut costs to survive:
Workforce was reduced from 250 employees to 77
Cloud infrastructure costs were slashed from $1.5 million to $900,000 per month
The company exited an expensive San Francisco office lease costing $145,000 per month
To compensate employees for lost equity value during the recap, Medium granted new equity awards to retain talent.
Medium’s valuation has dropped significantly from its previous $600 million peak, but Stubblebine declined to disclose the current valuation, saying it’s not important. Instead, he emphasized that Medium is now profitable, and that fact alone provides a more meaningful comparison point against other startups still burning cash.
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