Blogging platform provider Medium (A Medium Corporation) has raised $57 million Series B in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz with previous investors Google Ventures, Obvious Ventures, The Chernin Group and Greylock Partners also participating.

Founded in 2011 by Ev Williams and Biz Stone, both well known as the founders of Twitter, Inc., the site offers a blogging platform that is billed as a place that “connects people, stories and ideas that matter.”

At its base, it is a hosted blogging service that attempts to define itself as being different primarily through the delivery of a platform that is “simple, beautiful, collaborative” with the added bonus of content discovery: both in discovering what other people are writing about, and if you’re a user of the site, having your content shared to others who use Medium.

“At Medium we operate in a fundamentally different way. We don’t focus on pageviews, unique visitors, or click metrics….We aim to surface quality,” Medium’s Andy Doyle said in a statement announcing the new round.

Every action on Medium is shared with our network, meaning everyone is an influencer. Whether you post, highlight, recommend, or respond — Medium helps you move other people, see issues through a different lens, change minds, and inspire action.”

“We are confident this is the best model for both creators and audience in the long run,” Doyle concluded.

Business model

The way staff and founders speak at Medium is grossly ostentatious, complete with statements from the likes of Ev Williams comparing websites to dinosaurs and saying that existing websites are toast; to put it more crudely it’s a circle-jerk of self-congratulations, but here’s the catch: that ivory tower from which such statements of greatness are made has some very weak foundations.

That weakness is its business model.

Williams and his ilk can make also sorts of statements about how (arguably) prettier it is to look at a Medium page due to its lack of advertising, but the fun fact is that advertising still makes the web go round and Medium’s not without fault here either as so far its best idea for a business model: sell native advertising.

That’s right: hide advertising as editorial and charge people for it.

You can only be so moral when all you’re really saying is that you’re willing to take advertising, but instead you’re not going to make it so obvious.

Including the new round, Medium has raised $82 million over 2 rounds to-date.

The company did not say what it would use the new round for, saying only that they intended to launch new features at an event October 7.

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