Medium will try to save its media business with subscriptions

Medium is turning a new page in its business.

The digital self-publishing platform will release a consumer subscription product in the next month, Medium CEO Ev Williams announced at the Upfront Summit Thursday.

"Please subscribe," Williams said on stage. "This quarter, the goal is to launch the first version. It's going to be an upgrade to your Medium experience."

The news comes almost a month after Medium laid off 50 people, a third of its total staff, and closed its offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City. Medium, now over four years old, does generate revenue through advertising, but it hasn't been enough.

"It’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet," Williams wrote in a Medium post about the layoffs. "We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming for."

Medium declined to share more information about the news, first reported by TechCrunch.

It's already been a tough, changing landscape for Medium. The company had a shakeup, including layoffs, in June 2015, where, again, Williams took to Medium to share his vision on digital media: "Medium is not a publishing tool. It’s a network. A network of ideas that build off each other. And people. And GIFs."

It's not like people aren't using Medium. The number of posts nearly quadrupled from 1.9 million in 2015 to 7.5 million in 2016, according to Medium's year in review. Just earlier this week, two Medium posts received mainstream media attention. One post was viewed by more than 5 million people.

But revenue hasn't been a good story, even as Medium has raised $132 million.

Mike McCue, CEO of digital publishing app Flipboard, recently spoke on Mashable's BizPlease podcast and shared his respect for the founder and his platform.

Williams "is a very thoughtful guy and I think the world of him. He and I both believe that great stories move the world. He's built a great platform for creating and hosting those stories," McCue said. 

Flipboard, meanwhile, brings in revenue from digital ads.

Subscriptions do work for some publications. The New York Times just saw its biggest bump in digital subscriptions last quarter.

Snapchat has a subscription option for editions on Discover, but it is currently not paywalled. Facebook is working on its Snapchat Discover clone and exploring subscription, as outlined in its "Facebook Journalism Project."

Twitter's former Chief Financial Officer Adam Bain, speaking on the Jay & Farhad Show last month, said he regretted not experimenting with a subscription service or tiered experience while working at the network.

It is unclear how much a Medium subscription will cost and how it will work. Several individual publishers, including Conde Nast's Backchannel and The Ringer, publish exclusively on Medium.