Medium grows 140% to 60 million monthly visitors

Medium has released its end of year statistics revealing that it now sees 60 million unique monthly visitors (or readers, depending on your preference). This is a 140 percent increase from the 25 million the company said it had last year. Adoption of the publishing service appears to also be picking up, with 7.5 million posts penned, a 295 percent increase.

For a while, Medium has been promoting itself as a place where ideas can be shared and discussed. It has become a place used by people to pen “personal news,” while others have used it to write thoughtful pieces and defend their ideas on how to make the world a better place. As part of its year-end round up, the company has highlighted the most popular topics on the service, based on time spent. The number one? Politics.

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As Medium sees more readers on its site — 4.5 million hours a month are spent reading content — it’s touting that there’s quite a bit of activity taking place too, with “more new writers” joining this year than the previous three (how many new writers was not disclosed, however). In addition, more than 2 billion words were written, and there were 140,000 stories posted each week, an 86 percent yearly increase.

The U.S. ranks as the top country where readers spend the most time on the site, followed by Great Britain, Brazil, Canada, and Australia. Some of the most notable individuals who posted stories for the first time include former Reddit chief executive Ellen Pao, Lyft CEO John Zimmer, investor Mark Cuban, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Y Combinator president Sam Altman, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, former Vice President Al Gore, Chelsea Clinton, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Dr. Jill Biden, Senator John McCain, Al Roker, actors America Ferrera and Mila Kunis, directors Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, Tony Hawk, and Abby Wambach.

But what are people talking about on Medium? According to the company it’s mostly about politics. From there, sports was the second most read issue, followed by Donald Trump, startups, technology, the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, entrepreneurship, design, and life lessons.

If anything could be taken away from this, it’s that it seems Medium is resonating with people around at least three categories: politics, technology and startups, and sports. There are clearly other tags, but perhaps the company is looking to bring on board more content partners and publishers to attract a more diverse audience.

Finally, what was the top story of 2016 for Medium? It was all about Brexit and Trump.