Medium just launched a new feature called Series, which has a striking resemblance to the Snapchat Stories format. Medium is known for its universal blogging platform, allowing users to create their stories in a news-type scheme. Currently, its final business model is still up in the air, but it’s slowly making its way into mobile with Series, for starters.
Series is reminiscent of 19th century serial novels, and encourages users to create stories that unfold over time. “We wanted to build that continuity, and the update loop, right into the product,” says project manager Katie Zhu. In a blog post, the company calls them “a new way to tell deeper, more meaningful stories that develop over time.” It could be in the format of a travel journal, or to track personal progress. An example of this is a guy documenting his journey to dunk a basketball.
Despite taking a cue from history, Series is a contemporary way of telling stories. With the popularity of anything real time and mobile on the rise (ie. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Whatsapp Stories), Medium’s move of launching Series could provide a great possibility of success.
An overview of Series shows that it’s a more permanent version of the top social media apps’ version of Stories. Users have to tap on the right hand side of the screen or swipe left to move on to the next page, and pages contain different forms of media – from text to different photo formats. Users also get the convenience of the app remembering where they left off. The conclusion of each Series post contains the option for users to send clap emojis to show their appreciation.
At the moment, there are still some limitations to this new feature. For example, it doesn’t allow users to draw on any posts, something that’s been a big hit with the likes of Snapchat and Instagram. There are also no advertising slots for now.
The launch of Series could be a make or break hit for Medium. It rolled out yesterday on iOS, Android, and web, although Android users can only view but not create Series with the app for now.
